Tool Box
Issue No. 31 - October/November 2006
The perfect schedule
by Mr Matthew Michalewicz
Because scheduling touches on so many business processes most supply chain experts consider it to be a mission-critical activity. We don’t need to look far to see just how diverse scheduling problems can be.
The Detmold Packaging Group, a specialist converter of paper and board-based products and one of the larger manufacturers of paper packaging products in Australia and the Asia regions, produces 7,000 different products through a complex planning and scheduling process. “The products have to be grouped, prioritised, and allocated to machines,” says Tim Welsh, Site Manager at Detmold Packaging.
Compare that with McGuigan Simeon Wines, which manages more than 4570 hectares of vineyards and schedules thousands of tonnes of grape crushing at vintage each year. “With multiple wine production sites of varying capability and product focus, we pride ourselves to produce the best quality at the lowest price; this comes down to scheduling grape maturity with our wineries infrastructure capabilities. With the volumes we process each year, effective planning is key,” said Ryan Klose, Chief Information Officer at McGuigan Simeon Wines.
Even “very similar” scheduling problems can be very different due to company specific constraints and other factors. A good example of this is the ASC, South Australia’s iconic shipbuilder, which “schedules hundreds of people to undertake overlapping tasks with physical space constraints and specific skill requirements for submarine refits,” said Jon Moore, Submarine Manager at ASC.
Because of this enormous diversity in problem types, more and more organizations are developing their own tailor-made scheduling systems using in-house resources, outside experts, or a combination of the two. Most scheduling problems are very complex, often comany specific, and very difficult to solve with “off-the-shelf” software.
The issue of constraints often takes centre stage, as business manag...
