You spend time organising a production plan, generating the production orders and then schedule the machine shop for the next 3 months. Great! Everything neat and tidy, planned to perfection then – BANG! A customer places an unexpected order. That’s OK, we have orders in the system for these parts already from another customer, we can take from those and replace later. Sorry, No, that customer wants to bring 20% of his order forward. OK, there is just about enough time and labour to get them all done. – Erm, there might have been, if that new customer hadn’t wanted to double his order. Arghh!!! Although this is the right sort of problem to have – I think we’re gonna need a bigger pallet!
Chris Godfrey