What Does a Master Scheduler / Master Planner Do?
The Master Scheduler /Planner (MS/MP) can orchestrate manufacturing production with inventory forecasting to meet all sales and/or customer needs in such a manner that the manufacturing facility can easily meet all demands in a very organized, reliable and predictable manner while adhering to upper management and company policies. I state, “CAN”, because the MS/MP's effectiveness depends on the level of exchange of information he is privileged to. The MS/MP can be seen as either a “god” or a mere data entry monitor who just runs reports and just watches the willy-nilly progression of any jobs haphazardly through the shop. So we see in the MS/MP arenas, master schedulers and planners as vice presidents of operations or as mere data-entry-level-reports-runner personnel. More often, and too often we see the MS/MP hung somewhere in between, as a very frustrated manager or director whose foresight of properly using all the sophisticated tools at his fingertips is thwarted by lack of vision or endless emergencies –that he knows he could prevent and control were he granted the power -some power, any power or authority at all over all the processes he should be “Master” over.
With the sophistication and power of Master Scheduling and Planning tools that the MS/MP be relegated to a powerless observer is truly a waste of both the amazing computing power of today's PC's and the ability and talent of a well-trained and seasoned manager who may have even worked his way up through all the ranks of all the lines he is watching over.
How Did We Get Here?
Once a company computerizes even some of its workflows, awareness of even more automation with even more enhanced and computerized workflows grows as understanding and expertise with the new systems increase.
What is a Master Scheduler/Planner?
The first step in this (at times very long and painful) process is computerizing inventory. At that point, sales can easily see if what they are selling is in inventory. The next step is forecasting and dovetailing customer needs with available inventory and resources to manufacture the needed output. At this point, the company has gone beyond just a computerized inventory with some computerized accounting systems. In a manufacturing enterprise, the next natural progression is to research and purchase materials or manufacturing resource planning software tools known as “MRP's”. Initially, MRP's were designed for materials planning only -only one step beyond computerized inventory systems. As MRP's evolved, they eventually began to also provide processes for determining not only inventory, and material needs, but labor, and machine requirements. MRP's may or may not be tied in to other accounting aspects or systems.
Where Have We Come From?
Once forecasting is applied to inventory, the next progression is to tie personnel, equipment and various accounting systems into inventory along with purchase ordering, payables, receivables, and payroll. There are all sorts of very inventive ways of bootstrapping all these together. The problem is that bootstrapping always has tedious and labor intense manual interfaces of countless spreadsheets and many miscellaneous databases throughout organizations -with many unexpected and unknown interrelations between them. Eventually, company growth and/or the various complexities of manufacturing, taxation, regulations, uptime and downtime of personnel and equipment encourage -or force- companies into more complex software solutions to simplify these tasks and to once again increase productivity and shop reliability and cost effectiveness.
Where Are We Today?
Many old legacy systems are being converted into the next phase, that of enterprise wide resource planning (ERP). “ERP is short for enterprise resource planning, a business management system that integrates all facets of the business, including planning, manufacturing, sales, and marketing. As the ERP methodology has become more popular, software applications have emerged to help business managers implement ERP in business activities such as inventory control, order tracking, customer service, finance and human resources”. (Definition from http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/E/ERP.html).
What is MRP?
The most developed MRP methodologies begin to consolidate materials requirements planning, capacity requirements planning (CRP) and master production scheduling (MPS). As we can see, the project name includes the terms, “planning”, “inventory” and “costing”, and will enable integrated (“integrated” being the key element) planning, scheduling, costing, forecasting, mechanical fabrication, and electrical fabrication for flight projects and technology development; specifically, focusing on project planning at the shop and assembly level. The system will provide an integrated suite of processes and tools required by program, project, and line organizations in order to successfully estimate, plan, monitor, and execute their work.”
Where Are We Going With This?
The master scheduler / master planner should be the planning “god” (!?). All too often, planning is believed to be to be innate in the “planning” software. Those of us involved in planning know for a fact that we are most definitely no where near the level of artificial intelligence where the software planning module can actually do any planning at all on its own!
So how can a master scheduler/planner orchestrate production with inventory and resources to meet customer and upper management expectations? The key word is: “orchestrate”. The master scheduler must know everything that is happening in his own and/or all other departments, sections, and divisions - companywide that can impact his/her scheduling.
The MS/MP must navigate AND interface between upper management direction, company and departmental policies and guidelines and must schedule all resources accordingly. Master scheduling/planning can be broken down into various levels or into different “harmonics” (as in whistling while you work, or moaning and groaning or even complaining!?!) for various manufacturing runs for various items and projects. Some items or even projects could be deemed not worthy of master scheduler-master planner attention, like say, perhaps quick orders. Other, more complex, involved, regulated or more sensitive larger projects with complex interdependencies may be determined to be the MS/MP responsibility to get them successfully built within deadline and within budget constraints. Departmental or Divisional policies can be put in place to define and guide the master scheduler/planner's range of power, authority and accountability. Some jobs such as smaller routine jobs might remain on some sort of “automatic” with policies in place to allow a steady stream of small jobs such as quick orders or reworks or other smaller non-standard jobs such as valve re-certifications. However, larger, more crucial or complex projects would require that the master scheduler/planner be accorded a larger sphere of influence with many multi-level and multifaceted interfaces between upper, middle and lower management to fully and successfully orchestrate very large and very sensitive projects.
Can management give guidance to the master scheduler/planner with innovative policies put in place and enforced? Such would allow whatever vision of whatever ideal planning level or efficiencies are envisioned to occur. Can management stand behind the MS/MP and can the MS/MP stand behind management? Can personnel be trained to respect both and allow and follow such policies designed to grant smooth orchestration and greater efficiency? The true value and test of the MS/MP is can s/he prevent constant putting out fires, and adverse lack of planning domino effects throughout the factory, communicate effectively, rectify issues soundly, keep everybody happy in optimum high levels of production and keep to a schedule or a plan? Will his department, section, division, management and his company let him or her do so?
