{"id":697,"date":"2023-10-02T02:45:47","date_gmt":"2023-10-02T02:45:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/keypractices.viagointernational.com\/?page_id=697"},"modified":"2023-12-07T20:59:22","modified_gmt":"2023-12-07T20:59:22","slug":"constraint-schedule-application","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/keypractices.viagointernational.com\/?page_id=697","title":{"rendered":"Constraint Schedule Application"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It was just after 9.00 a.m., and Amy\u2019s day had already been ruined. Amy was the operations manager at Chic Fabrique, an upscale fabric manufacturing business, and to be fair, her day got ruined in exactly the same way quite often. That didn\u2019t make it any easier to take when it happened though. She was still staring glumly at the whiteboard in the meeting room when her colleague, Charlie, came in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne of the production supervisors told me I would probably find you here. Why have you got a face like someone just kicked over your oat milk latte?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amy spared him an irritated glance. Charlie was the new sales manager for Chic Fabrique, and he hadn\u2019t quite got to grips with how things worked \u2013 or didn\u2019t work \u2013 at Chic Fabrique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBecause we just finished planning and scheduling how we\u2019re going to fulfil the completion promises all our customers have been given.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlie looked puzzled. \u201cWell\u2026 that sounds like a good thing, actually. I\u2019m the one who makes those promises, and I\u2019m the one the customers will scream at if the promises get broken. So I\u2019m more or less okay with there being a plan for fulfilling those promises. What\u2019s the problem?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBecause it won\u2019t work,\u201d Amy sighed. \u201cThis happens over and over again, every few weeks or months. We come up with a plan to deal with all the different production schedules and fabrication times and so on. But something always changes. Late materials, customers changing their minds, whatever \u2013 it feels like there\u2019s always something. We try to patch things up on the fly so that the plan doesn\u2019t have so many holes in it that it becomes useless.” Amy pointed at the stack of papers in the bin. “Far too often, though, these do<\/em> become useless, and we have to come up with a new plan. Between planning and putting out fires while we try to make the plan work, it feels like there\u2019s no time for anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Charlie nodded slowly. \u201cThat does sound pretty bad. Have you tried, you know, enforcing the plan? Telling people that this is what the plan says, and no matter what happens, they need to stick with it?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYes, we have.\u201d Amy closed her eyes and sighed again. \u201cSomeone suggests that pretty much every time one of the plans comes apart, in fact. We just need to enforce the plan\u2026 hah!\u201d She opened her eyes again and stared wearily at Charlie. \u201cSurprise, surprise, that doesn\u2019t work either. We tell people to stick to the plan. But something still goes wrong, doesn\u2019t it? Murphy\u2019s law always kicks in somehow. So the operators reach the end of one job, and the next job has been delayed for some reason, and they just stand around waiting. I counted once, and over half the operators were idle while they waited for various preceding jobs to finish. I\u2019m just glad nobody from accounting saw it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Charlie sat down across the table from Amy and looked at her in shock. \u201cAmy\u2026 you\u2019re stuffed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI know. There\u2019s a plan to get things done, and I have to implement the plan, and the plan won\u2019t work, and I\u2019ll get blamed, and in six weeks we\u2019ll do it all over again. Sometimes I wish I\u2019d stayed in ballet school.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut we have to have completion promises that customers can rely on,\u201d Charlie said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amy shrugged helplessly. \u201cI know, I know. And to do that we have to keep everyone working. That means replanning and putting out fires, and generally adjusting the plan to make it fit reality. But to have completion promises that customers can rely on, we also<\/em> have to have time to do something other than planning and micromanaging events, and that means sticking to the plan. What\u2019s a girl to do?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She leaned forward towards Charlie, speaking faster and more urgently. \u201cOperations is in chaos, Charlie! Everything is more urgent than everything else, priorities change every five minutes, and we can\u2019t predict how long it\u2019ll take to get anything done because we don\u2019t know how much it\u2019s going to get interrupted. To top it all off, when we look back over the day\u2019s work, half the time we find that we were working ourselves to exhaustion trying to finish something we didn\u2019t even need that day! If you\u2019ve got any bright ideas, I\u2019d love to hear them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Charlie looked thoughtful. \u201cIt sounds like you need to regain control.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If looks could kill, Amy\u2019s glare would have turned Charlie into a smoking grease spot. \u201cI am aware of that, thank you. If you don\u2019t have anything more insightful to say, please allow me and my oat milk latte to suffer in peace.\u201d \u201cNo, but seriously,\u201d Charlie continued, his face intense. \u201cI may not be an operations guy, but I\u2019ve read a couple of books. You\u2019ve nominated a constraint for the plant, right?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOf course, that was just about the first thing we did.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRight, right. So\u2026 why not just schedule the constraint, and let the rest sort itself out? Jobs can\u2019t get done any faster than the constraint can process them anyway, so there\u2019s no point in releasing more work than that. Pushing more work in is just going to clog everything up and make the micromanagement problem even worse.\u201d Charlie was starting to sound enthusiastic about his idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amy nodded thoughtfully. \u201cThat\u2026 Well, we haven\u2019t tried it yet, anyway. I\u2019ll give it a go this time around and see if it helps.\u201d So that\u2019s what Amy did. She started with a simple change, scheduling the constraint operations in due date order, and tried not to worry about the fact that the rest of the operations would inevitably be idle occasionally. To Amy\u2019s surprise, it worked better than she had expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For one thing, the chaos in operations seemed to diminish significantly. More and more often, the work done by the constraint operation was actually the work that needed to be done that day. That meant priorities had to be switched around less often, which meant fewer interruptions to the jobs that were being processed. In turn, that meant that predicted completion times became more reliable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

After a couple of weeks had passed, Amy realised she was spending less time every day putting out fires, so she made a few more changes. Amy started grabbing jobs without due dates and squeezed those into gaps in the due date sequence, and the flow of work became even smoother. It had only been a few weeks, but Amy didn\u2019t want to go back to how things used to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, Amy found herself becoming quite protective of the constraint schedule! Charlie and some of the other sales staff were sometimes caught trying to push jobs onto the schedule, saying that they had to push it in or their customer wouldn\u2019t get it in time. Occasionally they were even right, and Amy allowed jobs that were a genuinely high priority to go on a sort of \u2018fast track,\u2019 indicated with a red tag on the job. Everything else had to wait its turn\u2026 although now that the chaos had dropped a lot, they usually didn\u2019t have to wait very long. Because completion times were more predictable now, Charlie knew in plenty of time whether a job was going to be late, and he could contact the customer if that was going to happen. The customers usually weren\u2019t all that pleased about the news, but they grudgingly admitted that it was better than having jobs be late without getting any warning, which was what used to happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From Amy\u2019s point of view, one of the best outcomes was that she was spending much less time micromanaging everything, so she now had time to think about other ways to improve productivity. She had a feeling that there might be a way to detect spikes of work before they hit the constraint schedule, and if they could manage that then the output of the constraint operation could get a significant boost. Perhaps it was time for another talk with Charlie\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was just after 9.00 a.m., and Amy\u2019s day had already been ruined. Amy was the operations manager at Chic Fabrique, an upscale fabric manufacturing business, and to be fair, her day got ruined in exactly the same way quite often. That didn\u2019t make it any easier to take when it happened though. She was …<\/p>\n

Constraint Schedule Application<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"set","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-697","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/keypractices.viagointernational.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/697"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/keypractices.viagointernational.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/keypractices.viagointernational.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keypractices.viagointernational.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keypractices.viagointernational.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=697"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/keypractices.viagointernational.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2495,"href":"https:\/\/keypractices.viagointernational.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/697\/revisions\/2495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/keypractices.viagointernational.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}