Machine Shop Scheduling

Although machine shops often are comparably small enterprises, scheduling machine shops belongs to the most complex scheduling challenges at all. This is attributed to the characteristics of a typical machine shop:

• Jobs with small batch sizes using shared resources
• Jobs with different routings, due dates and priorities
• Volatile environment: need to quickly react to short-term incidents

The machine shop scheduling challenge

There are some characteristics that make scheduling especially challenging for machine shops:

• Clients change their minds and modify their orders
• Suppliers do not deliver in time or in quality
• Machines break down or need to be maintained
• Necessity to do some rework as 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 manufactures 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 a machine shop scheduling software which is specifically built to fill this gap and to help make-to-order manufacturers with an easy time and resource scheduling. The just plan it scheduling engine is designed for SMBs and provides efficient automatic support.