Although job shops and machine shops often are comparably small enterprises, job shop scheduling and machine shop scheduling belongs to the most complex scheduling challenges at all. This is attributed to the characteristics of a typical job and machine shop:
- Jobs with small batch sizes using shared resources
- Jobs with different routings, due dates and priorities
- Volatile environment: permanent need to quickly react to short-term incidents
The job shop and machine shop scheduling challenge
There are some characteristics that make scheduling especially challenging for machine shops:
- Runtimes of operations can only be estimated roughly, and need to be adapted during execution constantly
- Clients change their minds and modify their orders
- Suppliers do not deliver on time or in quality
- Machines break down or need to be maintained
- Necessity to do some rework as the quality was not as expected
- Need to squeeze in a "hot job" for the no1 customer
Typically, standard enterprise software packages are rather complex, expensive, and require relevant IT skills. Hence, they often are not the appropriate solution for machine shops. Instead, many SMB make-to-order manufacturers tend to manage their shop schedule with homegrown Excel spreadsheets. Well, they might not be expensive in terms of the purchase price, but they require high manual maintenance, hardly scale with the business and they do not provide any kind of automatic support.
Master the challenge - without spending a fortune: just plan it
just plan it is designed for small companies working in a high-mix low-volume manufacturing environment. It masters the special challenges of its production planning, control, and execution processes by an automatic finite scheduling system. The result is a reliable production schedule, which leads to sustainable growth and success of the company. Gantt-chart-based makes it an intuitive tool for planners. Accessible via the cloud just plan it does not require any complicated installation. A favorable subscription model makes the production scheduling tool affordable for every small company.
