In many real-world manufacturing environments, disruptions occur frequently, forcing unexpected adjustments to their production schedules. Some of these disruptions, such as supply chain delays or equipment breakdowns, are simply inevitable, even for the most proactive and prepared organizations.
Naturally, changes to the production schedule will affect the timeline of when the output can be completed. However, there are also other unexpected ripple effects of schedule changes that can impact the site’s broader operations. Understanding the full impact of scheduling adjustments can help your team better proactively prepare for these situations, as well as look for solutions that will minimize the ramifications of each change.
Inventory Management
One common consequence of production schedule changes is that raw material inventory will be higher or lower than previously projected. For example, if a start time is delayed by two hours, the raw product will need to be stored for two hours longer than planned. This can cause issues if your plant is tight on inventory space. You may unexpectedly lack space for incoming deliveries. On the other hand, if a different project is moved up in the schedule to replace the delayed run, sites following a just-in-time inventory philosophy may not have the necessary materials available yet.
Managing inventory during production schedule changes can be especially challenging for industries like biopharmaceutical manufacturing, which may have raw materials with strict storage requirements. If product is stored for too long (or not long enough) at suboptimal temperatures, it may result in wasted resources, which increases costs and causes further disruptions. To avoid these problems, it’s critical to consider inventory requirements when adjusting the production schedule.
Capacity Utilization
If constant schedule changes are leaving your plant continuously behind on production, it can become very difficult to accurately track your site’s data. When schedule decisions are made on the fly and operations are in flux on a day-to-day basis, your team may not be able to accurately measure the site’s true capacity limits.
Accurate data on site capacity utilization is crucial if your organization has goals to increase profitability or introduce new products to the plant. If the site can’t determine whether it has any capacity available, it hinders its ability to make smart decisions about new projects or scale up production on a product with surging demand. It can also be difficult to properly forecast and plan around future demand. As a result, the company is forced to miss out on maximizing output and landing potential sales they could have earned with a smarter scheduling solution.
Overtime
Depending on how long production is delayed during a schedule change, your site may need to utilize overtime labor in order to meet deadlines. While some use of overtime is unavoidable in manufacturing, it also leads to increased labor costs, especially if labor schedules aren’t optimized to distribute employees’ hours equitably.
In addition to facing higher costs, plants that regularly use overtime production tend to be less productive per hour. According to a manufacturing report from the International Labour Office, a 10% increase in overtime can result in a 2.4% decrease in output per hour. Making a concerted effort to keep production during regularly scheduled hours can help keep costs down and efficiency up throughout the plant. An employee engagement survey from Kronos Incorporated indicates that employee burnout from too much overtime work is responsible for up to 50% of businesses’ annual turnover.
Supply Chain
If your site can’t efficiently adapt to schedule disruptions and wants to avoid utilizing overtime, it may ultimately lead to backorders and out-of-stock products. When production runs behind, it often results in missed deadlines throughout the rest of the supply chain, such as scheduled product shipments with logistics partners. Failing to fulfill these demands is not only a frustration to vendors and customers; it’s also missed revenue for the company, both immediately and potentially long-term if consumers find suitable alternatives.
Maintenance
It is not uncommon for plants to utilize time allocated for preventative maintenance or special projects to offset the impact of production delays. While these compromises might help the facility meet the proposed deadline, they could come at a significant long-term cost and create future disruptions. Overlooking necessary maintenance increases the odds of equipment failure requiring a lengthy repair or unnecessary capital expenditures on a replacement. Delaying special process improvement projects limit the plant’s ability to realize its capacity potential. At minimum, these maintenance or improvement tasks will need to be squeezed into sub-optimal timeframes that will impact normal operation.
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Without an advanced planning and scheduling tool, plants are left reacting to changing site conditions with last-minute, unoptimized schedule changes that can result in these troubling issues felt across the site. VirtECS is a unique planning and scheduling solution that solves many of these challenges for clients in a range of industries. VirtECS will not only suggest the best schedule based on your plant’s individual constraints, but it can also handle sudden schedule changes and account for subsequent adjustments that will need to be made throughout the production process.
As a finite scheduler at one of our biopharmaceutical clients put it, “VirtECS handles all of the ripple effects to the schedule when things change. It is a big time savings in a complicated process with lots of constraints.” If you’re interested in learning more about how VirtECS can improve your planning and scheduling processes, download our short overview guide to find out about the many benefits of implementing the tool at your plant.
