Friday afternoon: another schedule from the big customer
The customer's MRP sends a new delivery schedule every week. It is a spreadsheet of part numbers, dates and quantities covering the next few months. It looks almost identical to last week's. Somewhere in its rows, one part has been pulled forward a fortnight and another has doubled.
Someone in the office opens both files side by side and tries to spot the differences. Some weeks they catch everything. Some weeks they do not, and the first you hear is a shortage call from the customer's planner.
Why schedule changes slip through
The customer's schedule is not an order in the usual sense. It is a moving forecast with firm and planning zones, and each release supersedes the last. Your MRP wants discrete orders. Turning one into the other is manual work, and comparing releases is tedious enough that it gets rushed.
- Releases come from several customers, each in their own format.
- Some arrive by email, some have to be downloaded from a supplier portal.
- The changes that matter are buried among unchanged rows.
- Firm and forecast zones are not treated differently in your system.
- Nobody links a pulled in date to its effect on material and machine time.
What missed changes cost
A missed pull in means a late delivery against a date the customer thinks you accepted, and possibly an expedite charge or a line stoppage report. A missed push out means you make and stock parts the customer will not take for months, with the material and machine time tied up. Either way, your delivery rating with that customer suffers.
The schedule reader we build
- Each customer's releases are collected automatically from email or, where the portal allows it, downloaded on a schedule.
- A parser for each customer's format turns the release into a standard list: part number, revision, date, quantity, firm or forecast.
- The new release is compared line by line with the previous one. Changes are sorted into pulled in, pushed out, increased, reduced, new and cancelled.
- Changes inside your firm window, or inside your material lead time, are flagged as urgent.
- The planner reviews the changes and accepts them. Accepted changes update sales orders in your MRP or your order spreadsheet.
- Each change is logged with the release it came from, so a later disagreement with the customer can be answered with dates.
| Change type | What it usually triggers |
|---|---|
| Pulled in | Check material and machine time, move the job |
| Pushed out | Hold material, delay the job |
| Quantity up | Order extra material, extend the run |
| Quantity down | Avoid overproduction |
| New part number | Check drawing, program and material |
What the planner sees each week
A short list of what changed and what matters, rather than two spreadsheets to compare. Urgent changes arrive the same day as the release. The machine loading and the material orders move with the schedule. And when the customer asks why a delivery was late, there is a record of when they changed the date.
Over a few months the log also tells you something about the customer. If one planner routinely pulls dates inside your material lead time, that is a conversation to have at the next review, with the dates in front of you. Some shops use it to agree a firm window in writing, or to justify holding safety stock of bar for the parts that move most.
Is this your weekly headache?
- Customer schedules are compared by eye.
- You have been caught out by a pulled in date.
- Stock builds up for parts the customer then pushed out.
- Releases come from several portals with separate logins.
- Nobody can say when a date was changed and by whom.