Production Scheduling — Increased Efficiency
Production scheduling is the difference between a factory that reacts to whatever happened last week and a factory that runs to plan. Manu Online keeps scheduling inside the same system as your sales orders, work orders and purchase orders — so the plan reflects what is actually committed, in stock, and on the way in.
Real-time, demand-driven planning
Whenever a sales order, work order or purchase order is entered or changed, the resource planning system reschedules automatically. Material allocations, work order priorities and promise dates stay in sync without needing a nightly batch to make sense of it all.
Capacity by work cell
Each work cell can carry a defined capacity — the amount of work or machine time it can absorb in a given period. The scheduling page lets a planner manually rebalance load across cells, change priorities and reflect short-term reality (sick days, equipment maintenance, urgent customer needs) without pulling the whole plan apart.
Backwards from the promise date
The system schedules backwards from the sales order's promised date, taking into account working days per week, periods per day, and the per-unit and fixed throughput times set on the item card. Purchase lead times come from the item card too — so a missed delivery date immediately surfaces as a scheduling risk rather than a downstream surprise.
The night-run that cleans up the day
Each night a reallocation run goes over the day's activity to absorb manual stock corrections, fix any "crossed" allocations (e.g. shipping product allocated to customer A to customer B), and reorder material allocations by delivery date. Open work orders are weighted by start date and priority (1–100); planned work orders by sales order promise date.
Why it matters
- Fewer surprises — material and capacity issues show up when there is still time to act.
- Higher throughput — work flows through cells in the right order rather than the order it happened to land in.
- Better customer experience — promise dates that the system actually believes in, backed by allocations rather than spreadsheets.
For the underlying mechanics — work cells, multi-step routing, time entry and barcoding — see the Production article.
