the right destination. As a customer of airlines, you expect to go from point X to point Y, departing and arriving on time. The plane is staffed, stocked and fueled, the luggage is stowed, and the tray tables and seats are in an upright and locked position. The next time you travel by air, think about what goes
T
into getting you to your destination. The process starts well before you make your reservation, with an analysis of economic demand and supply curves and the costing and estimating behind them. As a customer, you want on-time delivery, and as a business, the airline wants a
he metalcasting industry can take several scheduling tips from the airline industry. For all of the faults and complaints against airlines, tens of thousands of flights are scheduled on a global basis every day, with the vast majority being on-time and traveling to
normal economic profit, where marginal revenue equals marginal cost. As a metalcaster, you have to analyze your throughput in
order to meet customer demand today and tomorrow. Do you need to add more core or molding machine capacity? Do you need to hire more employees or schedule more shifts and work days? These are all functions of advanced scheduling techniques. Decisions have to be made as to whether it is financially and economically more advan- tageous to have overcapacity or under-capacity (empty planes sitting on the tarmac vs. flights filled to capacity with customers going to the competitors to achieve on- time delivery). In the metalcasting industry, how much lead time will your customers tolerate before they go to the competition? When you fly, each time you encounter a person with
the airline, they had to be “scheduled” to perform their function, from check-in to baggage handling to direct- ing you to your gate. When your plane arrives at the gate, think about where it came from and what it took, scheduling wise, to reach its destination. A multitude of schedules within schedules within schedules are bringing this all together. So, how do you schedule your metalcasting operations,
and how well do you schedule them? What benchmark do you use to measure the effectiveness of your scheduling? Most importantly, how much did it cost you to schedule your deliverable? Take the following quiz to reflect on your operations’ scheduling prowess.
Pop Quiz The following questions and discussion points will
help you form an idea of where your scheduling stands and how it can be improved, keeping in mind that per- fect planning prevents problems, such as late delivery or long lead times.
Q MODERN CASTING / July 2010
Question #1. How do you schedule your metalcasting operations?
❑ A. We don’t schedule. ❑ B. In my head.
❑ C. Scrawled on the back of an envelope.
❑ D. With a spreadsheet.
❑ E. Using an enterprise resource planning (ERP)/material
resource planning (MRP) computerized system.
Basic scheduling does not have to be difficult or time consuming. Even with the most robust scheduling systems, human intervention is required. The production scheduler must have the ability to make “tweaks” to the system for
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