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Practical articles for production managers and shop supervisors at SMB job shops and CNC machining centers.
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Finite-capacity scheduling, Gantt planning, and production control guides for SMB job shops.
Every job shop gets rush orders. The ones that handle them without chaos have one thing in common: a live capacity view that shows immediately which m…
Most job shops track OTD when a customer complains. The shops that consistently hit their due dates track five metrics weekly.
On-time delivery starts with knowing — before the customer calls — which jobs are at risk. Here's a 5-step guide to improving OTD starting this week.
A scheduling conflict that reaches the shop floor costs $250–$1,000 in machine restart, resequencing, and lost capacity.
Most job shop owners know their whiteboard scheduling isn't ideal. Few have quantified what it's actually costing them. Here's the math.
Excel and most basic MRP systems use infinite capacity logic — they let you schedule 30 hours onto a machine that runs 8 hours a day.
Most job shops don't know how much manual scheduling is costing them. A $2M revenue shop loses an estimated $128,000–$276,000 per year. Here's the bre…
The schedule changes. That's not the problem. The problem is everyone finding out from a different source at a different time and reacting to a differ…
Most job shops never share their OTD numbers with customers — because they don't think the numbers look good enough. The ones that do share them often…
Most shop owners stopped running the schedule years ago. But they still need to read it — to know whether the next quarter is going to be a problem.
A scheduler asks: what's running today? A production manager asks: is the schedule we're running going to keep our customers? Different questions, dif…
If you're a new production manager at a job shop, you've inherited a scheduling system someone else built. Day 1 is about understanding it. Day 30 is …
Production scheduling sits at the center of every job shop's economics. Get it right and you ship on time at full margin. Get it wrong and you bleed $…