Practical examples according to what you can arrange production orders on the production plan

In previous articles on production planning, we have established that it is best to organize everything so that your production plan is a MIX of different approaches, where for your convenience we combine different approaches by planning work into machines, people, operations or groups of machines.

We strongly encourage you to read:

Below you will find more examples that you can be inspired by regarding what to plan, how to plan and what to arrange your production plan for.

Option 1 – production plan by individual machine

Here we have it all clear – production scheduling for machines, is probably the clear and most popular, and simplest of all, methods.

Where stacking production after machines will work:

• machining processes: individual CNC machine tools, saws, conventional lathes
• elastomer production: individual hydraulic presses
• plastic production: individual injection molding machines
• Packaging production: initial production processes like slotters, printing machines, screen printing.

How to get more out of post-machine scheduling:

• It would be useful if the order of the machines on the plan was somehow related to their positioning on the shop floor – for example, if you have 5 injection molding machines that stand from left to right on the shop floor, let them be from left to right in Prodio (how to change the order of machines – link).
• It is super to give the machine, instead of complicated names, some simple designations – it might as well be numbers. For example, for 5 similar injection molding machines, they can be, respectively, the number W1, W2,W3, W4,W5 or commonly used names like: Arburg under the window, Fanuc large, etc.
• If you have a lot of machines on the hall, it is worth dividing them into 2 computers (and desktops), so that on one side of the hall there is a computer with machines closer to it and on the other side respectively another computer with the right machines.

Option 2 – you gather the machines into the nests / groups that are on the shop floor

Instead of dividing the production plan into machines, assign them to groups on which a particular production step is performed, e.g. conventional lathes, processing center, etc. At this point, within a given work group, you can use tags to suggest execution on a given machine.

This approach works when:

• in technology you do not have a specifically imposed machine on which something is to be done hence you are left with more freedom,
• The bottleneck of the process in this case is the operator, who manages these several machines and decides for himself on which one he will do something,
• decomposition into individual machines/people would be too labor-intensive if you were to plan it in detail,
• you have a great deal of machinery on your shop floor, and you are just beginning the adventure of getting your work in order – so this approach will make it easier to put into action,
• where there are very simple machines and operations, there is no need to break them down, because they are really manual work (without association) – for example, when you have a worker next to large CNC machine tools, who later grinds by hand on various manual grinders / table grinders, then instead of separating the work into hand tools, you simply write the operation “grinders”.

Option 3 – layout of activities on production by operations / technological steps

Here, on the plan, instead of individual machines, we see the operations according to which we are going through .This is the most general approach, while we often find that in many industries it allows us to introduce basic control over the production process and what is going on in general, so that we do not go any lower.

Such a production schedule works great when:

• in a small company you do individual complex projects for the customer, for example, custom furnish his entire house with furniture, it is enough for you to know that the kitchen came off the cutting and assembly, and is on the varnish,
• you work on ready-made lists of elements from design programs – that is, you have situations as above,
• mainly you want to check the labor intensity of the process – that is, how much time went down to perform the given activities, so that at the end you know how much it cost to perform,
• for manual activities performed by a larger number of people – such as hand gluing boxes, sorting items,
• even if you produce products in batches, but all production always follows the same steps – then you actually see kanban boards with statuses.

Best practices when breaking down into phases/operations:

• take into account the stage of preparing documentation / writing programs by technologists,
• Don’t oversimplify, e.g. in most varnishes it is worthwhile instead of one varnish to break the operation into preparation for varnishing, pre-varnishing, sanding, finishing varnishing
• include field work crews, installation crews, service crews as a stage to arrange their work queues and track progress,
• include operations performed outside the company, e.g., galvanizing, heat treatment to track them on the plan and you can see where the component is.

Option 4 – scheduling by production employees

In Prodio, as in most production management software, you can, regardless of the division you adopt, always assign to a given task on a machine / operation who can perform it. That is absolutely not what we mean by this approach.

Here we’re talking about a situation where task queues are employees by name, with no machines assigned (or machines assigned as tags/notes to jobs). This approach may not work very well in larger companies, but sometimes in small ones it makes sense when:

• employees have unique skills and specialize in specific topics – it is necessary to queue mainly after them,
• You have experts who are actually the bottleneck of the entire production organization,
• there is no continuation of work on the same operation by another employee.

Just remember that this approach, when you depend on the knowledge of employees, in many cases ended badly for the company, so it is better to manage the company’s knowledge in a different way, for example, using a system of MES class.

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