Do Your Re-Schedules Work?

If something goes wrong in a manufacturing business there occasionally comes a time when you have stop what you are doing and re-schedule the order books. Hopefully before you do this you will have worked out what had caused the problem and addressed that first.

Some MRP systems will take care of this for you and some won't. If yours won't then I wanted to share this thought with you, in case your re-scheduling efforts seem to be in vain.

I see many businesses who, when they are faced with a re-schedule, don't do a complete job. They do enough to level out the next few weeks of production and then hope that they can get away without doing any more.

The next couple of weeks may go OK, but then the problems that were there beforehand start to amass, and a few weeks later your overdues are sky high again!

If you need to re-schedule your order books manually then please make sure that you do the entire job in one go. Don't pick at it. Don't just do the bits that look easy. Do the whole job.

It can take time, but doing it right once is far easier than re-hashing the whole thing day in day out until your customers leave you.

Giles Johnston
Author of 'Business Process Re-Engineering', a practical plan to improve business performance.

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