-By David Lawrence, Lean Manufacturing Consulting.

I wrote this article in the hope it helps manufacturers and engineers with a far smarter and far better means of job scheduling. I have worked in the manufacturing industries as a Production Manager for most of my 30 year career.

In the last six years I have also implemented Empower time tracking and factory productivity software in over 30 engineering businesses and 70 other manufacturing businesses throughout Australia and New Zealand. I am an independent contractor who works directly for engineers and other manufacturers.

I myself have struggled with job scheduling with NO good software available until 2016. I have manually updated spreadsheets several times through the day to “rejig” the schedule, I have updated job lists on paper and on whiteboards and then held meetings with other management and factory staff through the day to communicate the revised schedule. Sound familiar ?

In the last two years ‘Empower Job Scheduling’ has been re-built in the latest Cloud technology and it now works extremely well. This is a direct result of Empower implementing literally several hundreds of improvements suggested by many of our successful clients.

Empower Software is a locally owned company and has been developed with NZ and Australian engineers and other manufacturers over 14 years, which has proved invaluable in the success of this development.

Our Wish List at the start of the new Empower Job Scheduling Development included:

1 Must suit all forms of engineering, including general engineering, fabrication, sheet metal, structural, component manufacturing, trailers and all forms of agricultural and other equipment manufacturing. Must suit all businesses sizes from 6 factory staff to 100+ factory staff

2 Must allow Jobs and Tasks to be moved simply and quickly from one day to another by dragging and dropping within the daily and weekly calendar

3 Tasks and Jobs must update automatically when Tasks and Jobs are started and finished – in oher words real time updating and reporting from the factory floor

4 Must report current staff resource capacity to the factory and each work centre against daily planned job workload, to allow me clearly to see over and under daily capacity

5 Must allow me to schedule all jobs to each eg. machinery, welding, and fabrication work centres including the options for management or factory staff to batch jobs together

6 Must create planned daily workload and job lists, both graphically and Word document listings

7 Must report jobs that are currently late, highlighted ‘pink’ (because not many engineers want to be in pink). Jobs planned to be completed today are highlighted yellow. This colour coding is present on all factory staff screens, all management screens and on 50 inch TV monitors

8 Must back schedule all jobs – so milestone dates for each stage of each job are highly visible. Late jobs turn Pink.

9 Must schedule the factory team but also provide the option to schedule the pre production team and any site team involved, to provide company wide job scheduling

10 Must be viewable on 50 inch TV monitors in the centre of the office and factory floor

180 engineers and other manufacturers throughout Australia and New Zealand have purchased Empower. By listening to this large customer base, further improvements and updates are released automatically via the cloud system as often as every 2 weeks.

Existing engineering clients’ success with the software confirm that you could expect to increase your factory productivity and weekly factory output by 20% to 40%+ within approximately 6 weeks.

Empower Job Scheduling Benefits that I see on all engineering client sites I consult to:

1 A simple to use 15 minutes per day process for small to medium sized joiners to schedule jobs

2 Quick and easy to set up initially and have operating

3 Schedule once completed is available live to management and factory staff to see the updated schedule

4 Updates to the job schedule are available to the pre production team, factory staff team and any site team in all Empower Screens and in the form of email

5 Colour coding of ‘Pink’ and ‘Yellow’ jobs clearly shows late jobs and jobs needing to be finished today to keep all jobs on track

6 Factory Downtime reduces significantly, generating higher production hours daily and higher factory productivity

7 The number of our jobs completed on time as agreed with clients has increased substantially (Delivered in Full on Time – DIFOT)

8 The number of materials orders forgotten about and ordered late, which typically had additional freight costs and held up Jobs, has reduced significantly

9 Factory staff log onto the priority jobs assigned to them (not the jobs they personally wish to do first)

10 Allows one person in each company to schedule (and stops two or several people having their way and changing the schedule)

11 The Licence is a Low weekly cost, for such a huge benefit

During September, October & November 2016, Empower Software will make the software available to you for a 30 day trial, at no charge, if you are serious about taking the next step in improving your business. www.empowersoftware.co.nz