Production Planning, Production Control
& Staff Rostering

We have been organising shift patterns for over 16 years, our clients include government organisations, factories, universities, call centres, and the most important parameter with any shift pattern is the workload. The workload drives the shift pattern and part of our expertise is correctly assessing, estimating and organising that workload. These pages are specifically focused on factory and call centre operations where we have often found that production planning can be improved through using our optimisation techniques.

Plan of Work
The Plan of Work is the Production Plan that should happen on a shift to produce the required output. If your organisation uses SAP, or any of the other providers of similar work planning tools, then you will be familiar with the concepts of using software to help create a plan of work far into the future. These tools rely on statistics, such as the average time it takes to make a product, process a phone call, complete a truck delivery, or repair an item such an ATM or printing press. This is the planning part of the process. Using the plan requires a large amount of planning control at a local level that organises the required resources from the available resources. The required resources are the resources which are required to complete the plan of work assigned to each shift, on the other hand the available resources are the resources available on that shift to do the actual work. These are rarely the same. The key available resources are manpower and skills. It is now easy to combine a Plan of Work and the Staff Roster, so that the required resources and available resources are one and the same.

Firefighting.
What we often find within organisations is that the Shift Manager is forced to do this by hand on a shift-by-shift basis, often at the start of each shift. The technique is to 'see' who is there and reorganise the work according to a priority, such as; meeting a deadline or maximising utilisation rates. This technique is rarely analytical and relies on human resources such as memory and experience.

The effects on the next shift are rarely a consideration either. This makes the shift-by-shift method inefficient compared with a system that uses calculations based on long time frames over several shifts.

What is required is some easy to use software to help plan the work ahead of the shift which matches the staff roster with the plan of work. This software needs to be 'live' and include all the holidays and absences as they happen. It also needs to have the workload 'live' so that as changes are made during the day, they are converted into a resource requirement immediately and compared with the available resources. The software also needs to have an easy way to try out 'what-if?' scenarios, often, to see if there is a better plan or to see if extra work can be fitted into the plan.