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Insights on production scheduling, lean manufacturing, and manufacturing software from 35+ years of industry experience.
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My Schedule Runs Too Far Into the Future: Causes and Fixes
A schedule that lands weeks or months out is almost always a capacity or start-date constraint, not a bug. How to find the constraint pushing your jobs out and clear it.
My Transfer Batch Size Was Ignored: Causes and Fixes
When a transfer batch size has no effect on the schedule, the cause is a continuous-process machine, a batch as large as the order, or a competing flow step. How to tell which.
Queue Time and Flow Time Are Fighting Each Other: Causes and Fixes
When a step has both queue time and a flow step, the flow gate replaces the queue buffer and the downstream step can start too early. Why it happens and how to set them so they cooperate.
The Optimizer Made My Schedule Worse: Why It Almost Never Did
The optimizer is clamped to be never worse than your current schedule, so a worse result is almost always a misread: a proposal not yet accepted, a different goal, or locked jobs.
The Same Machine Is Double-Booked Across Two Jobs: Causes and Fixes
You have confirmed a real cross-job collision on one machine instance. The documented root causes are stale reservations, a synchronized-mirror capacity gap, and a wrong instance count.
The Setup Matrix Is Not Being Applied: Causes and Fixes
When changeover times fall back to the routing default instead of your sequence-dependent matrix, the cause is a missing cell, an unassigned family, or stale entries. How to tell which.
A Job Disappeared From the Schedule: Where It Actually Went
A job that vanished from the Gantt is rarely lost. Four documented explanations: a filter hiding it, the mode skipping it, a stock fulfillment, or a failure you have not read yet.
A Job Will Not Schedule At All: Reading the Failure and Fixing It
A job that comes back unscheduled has one of four documented causes. How to read the failure dialog, tell which cause you have, and fix each one at the source.
A Step Is Waiting and I Cannot See Why: Tracing the Delay
A step that starts later than its predecessor ended usually has a configured reason: queue time, transit, an overlap gate, a busy machine, or a missing operator. How to find which.
I Cannot Assign an Operator to a Step: Why, and the Fix
An operator you cannot pin, or a step that will not staff them, traces to skill, certification, or roster. How to read each block and fix it at the source.
The Hours Do Not Add Up on a Job: Which Number Is Right
A job whose hours look wrong usually traces to which figure you are reading or a routing change after scheduling. How to reconcile planned, actual, and expected hours.
My Imported Routing Came In Out of Order: Fixing the Step Links
An imported routing whose steps are misordered or disconnected traces to the sequence fields. How the two-pass import wires steps, why it broke, and how to fix each case.