At any time, a typical custom woodworking unit simultaneously pursues multiple projects (jobs) of different types and sizes using a limited set of resources. Such units can be described as job shops engaged in order-driven, high-variety production. Our article on scientific management of job shop production describes the difficulty of managing order-driven, high-variety production in job shops.

Control and management of production in custom woodworking units is difficult due to:

• Simultaneous execution of a variety of projects
• Stringent restrictions on project due dates
• Limited set of resources which are to be shared across concurrent projects
• Uncontrollable natural variation and unexpected events in the system.

For the same reasons, it is difficult to predict progress and completion times of projects. Lack of such prediction causes more anxiety to meet the stringent due dates and leads to early starting of projects, longer lead times and increased firefighting to expedite projects which are likely to be late.

Our software tool, Schedlyzer is powerful and useful for efficient production scheduling in custom woodworking units. It optimally schedules multiple projects subject to limited capacity of resources for increasing on-time delivery and throughput and for reducing WIP and job lead times.

Schedlyzer Lite, a lighter version of Schedlyzer is also useful for the same purpose but it is most economical among all powerful scheduling software for job shops. Read our web pages, Schedlyzer and Schedlyzer Lite for further details of these two tools.

Our scheduling software handles uncontrollable natural variation in the system and facilitates fast and extensive what-if analysis of schedules and proactive capacity planning. It has elegant, interactive graphic user interface for drag-and-drop operations on Gantt chart.

Benefits of Our Scheduling Software in Woodworking:

• Higher on-time completion time of projects / jobs
• Improved throughput
• Shorter project lead times
• Lower inventory
• Higher resource utilization
• Less firefighting
• Efficient bottleneck management
• Proactive capacity planning
• Easier handling of rush orders and order priority changes
• Quick, optimum response to changes in production or customer requirements
• Intelligent decision support for efficient production management.

Although our powerful software, Schedlyzer and Schedlyzer Lite do not require users to have rigorous training for several hours, the users need to have some help from us in the initial stage. Either software tool can be used as standalone scheduling software or it can be integrated with any popular ERP package.

Our software tools Schedlyzer and Schedlyzer Lite are very efficient for scheduling production / service systems involving multi-skilled workers subject to all relevant constraints. They can easily handle all the issues mentioned above and generate in a few seconds an optimal workload schedule and the corresponding dispatch lists for individual resources. To get optimal utilization of multi-skilled workers by our software, the users must specify resource requirement of operations in terms of skills rather than specific worker names.

Both Schedlyzer and Lite predict workflow, bottlenecks and order completion times in a realistic fashion. They also facilitate fast and extensive what-if analysis of schedules for any changes in the situation and supports proactive capacity planning. The what-if analysis function of our software enables managers to evaluate in advance the benefit of training a worker for additional skills. Schedlyzer Lite can directly take input from simple Excel files also. Our software helps woodworking units achieve the objective:

Get the maximum productivity from the existing workforce and find cost-effective opportunities for increasing the flexibility of workers.

Practical utility of a scheduling tool can be properly evaluated for any specific production unit by using it with real data for some days. For this reason, we freely offer duly configured, fully functional, 60-day trial copy of our software. Contact us for a free trial copy. Before giving the free trial copy, we would first present a live web demo of our software and configure the copy as required for your system. We would also offer you free help during trial runs.