The whiteboard in the planner's office
Line 1 is on the chilled range until ten, then a clean-down, then the vegetarian run. Line 2 is short-staffed on nights. A retailer amends an order at eleven and a key ingredient delivery is late. The planner wipes half the board, rewrites it, updates the spreadsheet, prints it and walks it to the shift managers.
It works, because the planner is good at it. It also means that when the planner is on holiday, the schedule is a guess.
Why it stays on the whiteboard
Food production scheduling is harder than it looks from outside. Generic planning tools do not know that a line cannot go from one product family to another without a full clean-down, or that a particular product must run first after a changeover because of your own site rules. So the knowledge stays in the planner's head and the tool stays a whiteboard.
- Changeover sequence rules set by your technical team, which vary by product family.
- Different run rates for each product on each line.
- Staffing levels that change by shift.
- Ingredients and packaging that must be on site before a run.
- Orders that change after the schedule is fixed.
The cost of a hand-built schedule
Changes take a long time to absorb, so the factory reacts slowly. Extra changeovers creep in because the best sequence is hard to see when rebuilding under pressure. Shift managers work from printed copies that may already be out of date. And the whole operation depends on one or two people.
The scheduler we build
- Lines, run rates per product, crewing needs and shift patterns are set up with your operations team.
- Changeover rules are recorded exactly as your technical team defines them: which product families can follow which, and what clean-down time applies. The tool follows them; it does not decide them.
- Confirmed orders come in from your ERP or order system, along with stock of finished goods, so only what is needed is scheduled.
- The tool drafts a schedule for each line, choosing a sequence that respects the rules and keeps changeovers down, and shows material shortages against each run.
- The planner drags runs around, locks the ones that cannot move, and sees the knock-on effect before accepting.
- The accepted schedule is shown on screens or tablets on the floor, so everyone sees the current version, not a printout.
| Input | Kept by |
|---|---|
| Changeover sequence rules | Your technical team |
| Run rates and crewing | Operations |
| Orders and stock | ERP or order system |
| Material availability | Purchasing and stores |
The planner stays in charge. The tool drafts, the planner decides.
A schedule that keeps up
An order change becomes a re-plan that shows its consequences before anyone commits, not a whiteboard rewrite. Shift managers see the live version. Someone other than the head planner can run it when needed, because the rules are written down in the tool rather than held in one head.
Purchasing and stores gain from it too. With runs laid out for the coming days, they can see which ingredient and packaging deliveries are needed on which morning, and which late delivery will stop a line. The conversation shifts from why has the line stopped to what do we swap in if the film is not here by Wednesday.
Over time the schedule becomes a record as well. Planned against actual output by line and shift shows where run rates in the tool are optimistic, and the operations team can correct them.
Signs your scheduling needs help
- The production schedule is a whiteboard and a spreadsheet.
- One person knows how to build it.
- Changes mid-week cause a full rebuild.
- Shift managers work from printed copies.
- Material shortages are found when the run is about to start.