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Insights on production scheduling, lean manufacturing, and manufacturing software from 35+ years of industry experience.
How the platform actually works: scheduling, optimization, the shop floor and ERP data.
A Schedule Points to a Deleted Work Center
When a schedule references a work center that was deleted, reports cannot resolve it. Restore the machine or reassign the routing step, then re-run scheduling.
A Work Center Shows More Hours Than It Has: The Causes
When a work center's daily booking exceeds its physical hours, it is one of three causes: synchronized machines, stale reschedule rows, or an understated instance count.
An Anchored Job Did Not Hit Its Target Date
When a bottleneck-anchored job fails to schedule to its target, the cause is bottleneck capacity, a past target date, or feeder steps that cannot finish in time.
I Set Move or Teardown Hours but Nothing Changed
Move and teardown hours do not move the schedule: the scheduler never reads them for timing or capacity. Use setup, queue, or a separate step to affect dates.
My Transit Days Used Calendar Days Instead of Working Days
When a transit set to working-day mode quietly counts calendar days, the routing step's work center is missing or inactive. Reactivate or reassign it, then re-run.
The Reschedule Took Too Long
When a scheduling run drags, the usual levers are the run mode, diagnostic logging left on, and parallel groups searching for a shared window. What to tune first.
A Blank Cell in My Import Wiped a Value: Why, and How to Prevent It
Blank cells are supposed to be preserved on update, so a wiped value usually means the row was a create, not an update, or the entity does not reconcile that way.
A Material Step Is Holding Up My Job: Where the Delay Really Comes From
A material step is instant by design, so a job that seems stuck on one is usually a mislabeled work-center step, a downstream dependency, or transit time. How to trace it.
A Reschedule Created a Duplicate Schedule Row
Two schedule rows for the same job step usually mean a split-op pair the merge missed, and a clean re-run collapses them. How to tell a real duplicate from a parallel sibling.
An Operator With the Right Skill Was Not Used: Certification, Roster, Time Off
A qualified operator the scheduler skips is usually filtered by an expired certification, a missing roster row, or time off. How to read the pool and fix each.
Inventory On-Hand Looks Wrong After a Reschedule
On-hand is a cache over an append-only ledger, so a wrong figure after a reschedule usually traces to cache drift, an in-flight build, or a missing consume issue. How to reconcile.
My Imported Hours Came In Wrong: Minutes, Hours, and the Conversion Factor
Imported setup or run hours that are 60 times too big or too small almost always trace to a units mismatch. How to read the conversion factor and fix an import mask.