Insights / Article / Business process reengineering (BPR)
ArticlePlan to produce: connecting plans to the shop floor
Production plans often fail because information moves slowly between planners and operators. How sharing one plan, capturing actuals promptly and reviewing variances weekly closes the gap.
In many manufacturing businesses, the production plan and the shop floor live in different worlds. Planners build a schedule in the planning system or a large spreadsheet. Supervisors run the shift from a printed list, a whiteboard and their own judgement. Buyers order materials against a forecast that may already be out of date. By midweek, the plan describes what was intended on Monday, not what is happening now.
Production plans often fail because information moves slowly between planners and operators. The plan itself may be sound. The problem is that changes on the floor, such as a machine breakdown, a material shortage, a quality hold or an absent operator, take hours or days to reach the planners, and changes to the plan take as long to reach the floor. Each side works from a different picture.
What the gap costs
The symptoms are familiar to most production managers. Expediting becomes a daily routine, with planners and supervisors chasing urgent orders by phone. Materials arrive for jobs that have been moved, while jobs that need running wait for materials nobody ordered in time. Changeovers multiply as the sequence is rearranged on the fly. Customer delivery dates slip, and sales loses confidence in the dates it is given.
Inventory tends to rise as well. When people cannot trust the plan, they protect themselves: buyers order extra safety stock, supervisors run longer batches than needed, and work in progress builds up between operations. Each response is sensible locally. Together, they tie up cash and floor space.
Share one plan
Planners, buyers and supervisors should see the same schedule.
The first step is simple to state and harder to achieve: one version of the schedule, visible to everyone who needs it, updated in one place. When the plan changes, everyone sees the change at the same time. When a supervisor needs to deviate, they can see the effect on later jobs and the planner can see the deviation immediately.
- Publish the schedule from the planning system to screens or tablets on the floor, rather than printing it once a day.
- Freeze a short window, perhaps the next shift or day, so the floor has stability, and allow changes beyond it.
- Agree who may change the schedule within the frozen window, and how changes are recorded.
- Give buyers the same view, so material orders follow the current plan rather than last week’s.
Consider a typical food or packaging manufacturer running several lines. If the planner reschedules a product to a different line to work around a breakdown, the change appears on the line screens immediately, the supervisor can confirm materials are staged, and the buyer can see whether the packaging for the moved product will arrive in time. A dozen phone calls become a single update.
Stability before speed
A plan that changes constantly is as hard to follow as one that changes too slowly. A short frozen window gives the floor time to prepare, while keeping flexibility further out. Agree the window jointly between planning and production.
Capture actuals
Record what was made and consumed close to when it happens.
A shared plan is only useful if it is updated with what actually happened. In many plants, production quantities, scrap and material consumption are recorded on paper during the shift and entered into the system later, sometimes the next day, sometimes at the end of the week. Until then, the planning system believes the plan was followed exactly.
The longer the delay, the more the system’s view of stock and progress drifts from reality. Planners schedule jobs that cannot run because materials have already been used elsewhere. Buyers reorder items that are in stock but not yet recorded. Customer service promises dates based on progress that has not happened.
- Record job start, finish and quantities produced at the line, using a terminal, tablet or scanner.
- Record scrap and rework with a simple reason code at the time it occurs.
- Record material consumption as it happens, or derive it automatically from quantities produced where bills of materials are accurate.
- Record unplanned stops and their causes, even briefly.
Keep the recording simple. Operators are there to make products, not to fill in forms. A few taps on a screen at the end of each job is realistic; a detailed form for every pallet is not. Where possible, take data directly from machines, such as counts and running time, to reduce manual effort further.
Review variances
Compare plan with actual weekly and ask why.
With a shared plan and timely actuals, the differences between them become visible. A short weekly review between planning, production, purchasing and maintenance looks at the largest variances and asks what caused them. Was a job late because a machine broke down, because material arrived late, because the standard time is wrong, or because the job was rescheduled to make way for an urgent order?
- Review adherence to schedule: which jobs ran as planned, which moved and why.
- Review output against plan by line or cell, and the main causes of shortfall.
- Review scrap and rework by reason code.
- Agree actions on recurring causes, with owners and dates.
The most valuable output of the review is often a correction to the planning assumptions. If a product consistently takes longer than its standard time, the standard should change, or the planner will keep overloading the schedule. If a supplier is consistently late, lead times in the system should reflect reality. Over time, the plan becomes more realistic and needs less firefighting.
For years our planners and supervisors blamed each other. Once we put the same schedule on both their screens and reviewed variances together every Friday, the conversations changed from who was wrong to what to fix.
Plant manager, packaging manufacturer
Where to start
Choose one line or cell with frequent schedule changes. Put the current schedule on a screen at the line, agree a frozen window, and start recording job completions and stops at the time they happen. Hold a thirty-minute weekly variance review for two months. Use what it reveals to correct standard times and lead times, then extend the approach to the next line.
Source: Intelliversal analysis.
