Three colours of marker and a phone photo
The production manager comes in early to rewrite the board. Litho press on the left, digital in the middle, guillotine, folder, stitcher and laminator along the bottom. Each job is a magnet or a line of marker with a customer name and a date. By ten, a customer has rung about a rush job, the folder has jammed on a heavy stock, and the plates for the afternoon job are late from prepress. The board is out of date and only one person really understands it.
Someone takes a photo of it on their phone to send to the account handlers, who still ring the production manager to ask whether their job will make its Friday delivery.
The schedule is a chain, the board treats it as a list
A print job is not one task. It is prepress, then a press, then one or more finishing operations, then dispatch, and each step waits for the one before. A whiteboard shows what each machine is doing but not how a delay on the press pushes the folder and the delivery date.
- Finishing capacity is often the real limit, and the board rarely shows it.
- Makeready time depends on what ran before, such as a colour or stock change, and nobody plans for it.
- Rush jobs are squeezed in without seeing which jobs they push out.
- Due dates live in the MIS while the plan lives on the board, and they drift apart.
- The whole plan depends on the person who wrote it being in the building.
What the whiteboard costs
Missed delivery dates are the visible part. Behind them sit idle presses waiting for plates or paper, finishing machines swamped on Thursday afternoon, overtime to catch up and account handlers who cannot give customers a straight answer. Each rush job is accepted without knowing the real cost to everything else in the queue, which makes it hard to charge for or to turn down.
A production schedule that understands routes
- Each machine is set up with its hours, speeds and the jobs it can handle, including finishing kit such as folders, stitchers, laminators and the guillotine.
- Confirmed jobs come in from your MIS with their route: which press, which finishing steps, which due date. Jobs without a route are flagged.
- The schedule places each step in order and shows when the job will finish, taking into account what is already queued on each machine.
- Dependencies are tracked. A job cannot start on the press until plates and stock are confirmed, and finishing sees jobs coming before they arrive.
- The production manager drags jobs around the plan. Every move shows the effect on due dates, so a rush job's cost is visible before it is accepted.
- Each station has a screen with its next jobs in order, and marks each step done, so the plan corrects itself through the day.
| Question | Whiteboard | Schedule |
|---|---|---|
| What runs next on the folder? | Ask the manager | Folder's own list |
| Will this job make Friday? | Best guess | Projected finish shown |
| What does this rush job push out? | Found out later | Shown before accepting |
| Are plates and stock ready? | Walk and check | Readiness flags per job |
The schedule does not replace the production manager's judgement. It gives them a plan that updates itself so they can spend their time on decisions, not on rewriting marker.
A production day with a live plan
Account handlers can see a projected finish date for their jobs and stop ringing production. Finishing sees what is coming and can plan staff around it. The production manager can accept a rush job knowing what moves, or tell the customer honestly what is possible. When the manager is off, someone else can run the day from the same plan.
It also gives you information you did not have before. Over a few months, the schedule shows which machine is really the bottleneck, which matters when you think about new kit or extra shifts.
Is your schedule on a board?
- One person owns the production plan and it lives in their head or on a board.
- Account handlers ring production to ask about dates.
- Finishing regularly has a pile-up late in the week.
- Rush jobs are accepted without knowing what they displace.
- Jobs miss dates because plates or stock were not ready.