Job Scheduling

[martycip]

How do you schedule your customer's jobs? We have three full time framers working on an assembly line type process. The problem that we are encountering just lately is that the design people schedule based on our next available date without regard to the difficulty of the pieces that are being framed. We have a set number of pieces scheduled per day. We are so busy at the moment that we are finding that it is too many on some days when they are all difficult jobs and not enough on other days when they are all easy. Does anyone have a way of scheduling that takes into account degree of difficulty? It's a nice problem to have, but a problem just the same.

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Marty Cipolla, CPF
Marty & Pat's Frame Shoppe
Fort Worth, TX
www.martyandpats.com

[Audrey Levins]

Marty--

You don't really give enough information to clarify your problem...if you are that busy, it seems to me that you shouldn't have "easy" days--the days where your scheduled allotment of orders are easy and therefore finished sooner should be the days you start on the hefty projects to get ahead.

And unless you are worried about overtime, if you've got so many hard orders to do that you're falling behind, that's a day you can afford to pay everyone, including yourself, to stay later and finish up. An owner who works 14 hours on a given day is an owner who made a lot of money. http://www.thegrumble.com/framer/ubbs/smile.gif

And you, as the owner, can also go through your paperwork every morning and realize what orders were taken the day before, what needs to be done and how long it will take...and if it means pushing your due date back a day, it's better than calling customers to tell them their order will be late. FullCalc makes all that pretty simple. http://www.thegrumble.com/framer/ubbs/smile.gif

And as for your design people scheduling orders due regardless of their difficulty, based on a per-day number of orders, they can always just bump up the due date if they are knowledgeable enough to realize that they've given ten difficult orders the same due date. I do this myself at work--if our computer is set at 35 orders a day, and I've taken four shadowboxes, five stitch-mounts, a handful of delicate orders, etc., and a few other simple orders, I just close that due date.

That's the beauty of FullCalc. It makes everything so #### easy. http://www.thegrumble.com/framer/ubbs/smile.gif

Good luck.

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I don't care what color your sofa is.

[Frank]

I'm not sure this would work but it sounds reasonable. Try scheduling by the dollar amount instead of the number of pieces. The more complicated pieces should cost more than the easy pieces so that should balance the load out a little better. In other words instead of thinking you can do 20 pieces a day think $3000/day.

[Marc Lzier]

Please 'splain assembly line.
Who does what? How large of a workshop?
Hoy many fitting tables.
What kind of (for mldg, glass and mats) cutter? Is there a bottleneck? Is there a limit to what your shop can produce?

Right now we work on the "what day do you want it" premise. Sure, Fri, gets more than Wed. But if it is Monday, and you have done all the stuff due for Tues, then start on Wed, etc . . .?

If material is not ready yet (a frame or mat or whatever), keep the work(order) at the front of the bin, and do it when the materials are ready?

Maybe it is time for a another fitter?
Maybe it is time for some overtime to get back on schedule?

'splain more.

[JRB]

We have a large board that has 33 Plexiglass
"pockets" on it. The pockets are numbered 1 through 31, much like a calendar. Each pocket will hold about 25 invoices.

As the work comes in to the shop it is put away. The works location is noted on the invoice, the invoice is then put in one of the extra pockets that is labeled " to be ordered".

Once a week we order all the materials needed to complete the new invoices, those invoices are checked for rushes, unusual procedures are highlighted with a yellow highlight pen. We then will put them in the work line up in the order they came into the shop. The quantity of the work to be done or the difficulty of the projects are taken into consideration. Remember, each pocket represents the invoices to be completed on a given day.

The scheduling of work is determined by the shop crew, not the design crew.

All our work is taken in on the premise that it will take about two weeks to complete the order, rush orders excepted.

In my old high volume store, this board was critical, now that it is a two person medium volume shop it is not so critical, but it sure makes our life a lot easier.

The beauty of it is you can see at a glance your entire months work flow.

John

[Lance E]

The only way to solve this is with computer software that you can allocate the available hours on, get out the stopwatches and start timing. The software we use at POS has the ability to calulate hours required for each job and I often check to make sure that it is accurate, also for the difficult jobs you can add the hours required.

[martycip]

Lance,
What software do you use? We currently use Lifesaver but it does not have the capability that yours does. It is important to us that the due date be determined by our pos people because we tell the customer when their framing will be done and we do everything in our power to stick to that date.

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Marty Cipolla, CPF
Marty & Pat's Frame Shoppe
Fort Worth, TX
www.martyandpats.com