The schedule is right until the first supplier moves.
Multi-level BOMs, shared capacity across sites, long-lead purchased components and a master schedule that takes most of a day to rebuild. So it gets rebuilt once, and then defended for a week it should not have survived.
Industrial equipment · Automotive and vehicle components · Electrical and electronics · Building products · Metals and fabrication · Plastics and packaging
Where the decision stalls.
Master scheduling is a spreadsheet exercise
Twenty-odd sheets maintained by different people, reconciled by hand. Any material change after the run means starting over, so in practice the schedule freezes early.
One component, three BOM levels, four finished goods
A single purchased part slipping affects products nobody traced back to it until the promise date was already missed.
Capacity the plan assumes versus capacity the line has
The plan runs on routings. The floor runs on the machine that went down Thursday. MES knows; the planning system finds out in the variance report.
Sites share supply and customers but not a schedule
Each plant optimizes locally. The combination overbuilds in one place and starves another, and nobody owns the tradeoff between them.
One story: a nine-day supplier slip on a shared component
A supplier confirms a nine-day slip on a component that feeds three finished goods across two plants. Two of those goods have firm promise dates this month. The question is not whether you are late — it is who you are late to, and by how much, and whether the plan can absorb it instead.
Master Production Scheduling
Resequences across both plants against real capacity and shared supply, and returns the sequences that hold rather than the one that looks best on paper.
Lead-Time and Safety-Stock Optimization
Re-evaluates what has to be on hand, and where, against the schedule that will actually run — not the one that was frozen last week.
Promise-Date Jeopardy
Flags which commitments are now at risk, costs the alternatives, and returns the commitment that cannot be held as a constraint on the plan rather than an escalation.
One reconciled recommendation, ranked, with the trigger, the alternatives considered, the constraint that applied and the expected impact attached — ready to approve, edit or reject. Not three separate alerts from three separate systems.
A ~$500M industrial manufacturer and distributor took its master production scheduling cycle from 18 hours across 24 spreadsheets to a single 15-minute run, with lower inventory carrying cost and improved cash conversion.
Start with your version of this decision.
Thirty minutes on the decision that costs your operation the most, mapped across the systems you actually run.