Production Scheduling: Moving Beyond the Spreadsheet

Many manufacturers are still scheduling production on spreadsheets. Here's why that's costing them money and what to do about it.

Production scheduling spreadsheets start life as clever solutions to complex problems. But over time, they grow in complexity, become owned by a single individual, and gradually become impossible to maintain.

Beyond the ownership problem, spreadsheets can't cope with the complexity of modern manufacturing. They can't model constraints accurately, they can't optimise across competing priorities, and they can't reschedule in real time when things go wrong.

A modern production scheduling solution should be able to generate an optimised schedule based on real business constraints — capacity, materials, labour, tooling, allergen management, and more — in minutes rather than hours.

sofco's Scheduling solution has been deployed at manufacturers across food & beverage, consumer goods, and industrial manufacturing, consistently delivering significant improvements in changeover efficiency, line utilisation, and on-time delivery performance.