What are your Scheduling/Planning Considerations?

[Stephen Marsh]

I am interested in what your company uses to help plan work in order to meet the due date. This scheduling/planning info could be for any department, however may be focussed on print and or finishing, or perhaps even taking outsourcing into account.

I have searched the forum for past discussions and from my own experience have found that the following considerations are the most common:

1) Order Due Date (or more to the point, a set date before the order due date to ensure that the true due date is met)

2) Total expected labour time for all jobs in a certain department that fall before a certain date in order to evaluate department or machine loading

3) Jobs on press that use the same colours to reduce make ready and wash up etc (running two jobs back to back that may be say CMYK+Spot 485 red etc.

So, what do you do? How do you plan your work? What tools or methods help you to do this? Do you have job ganging software that factors in due date or other info such as specific ink colours? Do you run reports from an MIS/ERP? If you do run MIS reports, what content is in them - can you post a sample of such a report that you find useful?

I have not worked in a production planning role, so even basic tips are appreciated. Thanks in advance.


Stephen Marsh

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Bump, how do you go about planning the order of the jobs that go into art, repro, print, finishing etc?


Stephen Marsh

 

[Stephen Marsh]

So nobody has any current advice, tips or comments on planning/scheduling jobs into production?


Stephen Marsh

 

[Alith7]

Stephen~
we just went through this at my shop. I don't have time right at this moment to give you a full response, but I'll update tonight.

 

[Craig]

Trello and Morning Flight here.

 

[kansasquaker]

To be honest, we manage by due date. We don't have enough time on most of our projects to let the sit in a queue waiting for similar work to gang with. We do try to run similar jobs in order as much as possible but on time delivery is always the priority. Our scheduling typically only looks forward about 24 hours. We pull various reports our of our MIS system (which is home built in FileMaker Pro) and schedule machinery based on those reports. It's more about figuring out what jobs are ready to work, must work or can wait depending on the day and the machine. Sometimes it feels really out of control, but it allows us the flexibility our customers demand. I don't know how it is for the work you're managing. I suppose it varies greatly depending on the expectations set by customers. PM me if you'd like me to send you some of the reports we use.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Stephen~
we just went through this at my shop. I don't have time right at this moment to give you a full response, but I'll update tonight.

Thank you Alith7!

I look forward to your input.


Stephen Marsh

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Trello and Morning Flight here.

Craig, thank you for the reply. How exactly do you use Morning Flight and Trello to schedule work?

In Morning Flight, I presume that you are using the due date and order tracker. Can you go into more detail?

In Trello, how do you layout cards on the board? Do you use a timeline or just the basic board? Do you setup different departments, operators or machines and put cards onto these items? How do you plan out the work, what decisions do you make? How do you get the data from Morning Flight into Trello?


Stephen Marsh

 

[Stephen Marsh]

To be honest, we manage by due date. We don't have enough time on most of our projects to let the sit in a queue waiting for similar work to gang with. We do try to run similar jobs in order as much as possible but on time delivery is always the priority. Our scheduling typically only looks forward about 24 hours. We pull various reports our of our MIS system (which is home built in FileMaker Pro) and schedule machinery based on those reports. It's more about figuring out what jobs are ready to work, must work or can wait depending on the day and the machine. Sometimes it feels really out of control, but it allows us the flexibility our customers demand. I don't know how it is for the work you're managing. I suppose it varies greatly depending on the expectations set by customers. PM me if you'd like me to send you some of the reports we use.

kansasquaker, thank you for the reply, I will certainly contact you via PM, I am curious to see what report info you find useful for scheduling.


Stephen Marsh

 

[Morning Flight]

Craig, thank you for the reply. How exactly do you use Morning Flight and Trello to schedule work? In Morning Flight, I presume that you are using the due date and order tracker. Can you go into more detail?

Stephen, I can tackle the easy part - Morning Flight. In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote the program.

Morning Flight - V13.1

Hal Heindel

 

[Alith7]

Stephen~
We schedule by press, then by due date, but we do try to gang up runs with similar colors, or int he case of the 4-color work, coatings and papers.

We use Presidio by Printers Software. Printers Software Inc - Print Management Software - Print Estimating - Print Job Costing- Print MIS And, no, I am not associated with them, but we have tried a LOT of different MIS and estimating systems, including Morning Flight, Franklin Estimating, and demo'd pretty much every other one I could find.

The reasons we chose Presidio:
1. Everything in their software is modular. You can use as much or as little of it as you want, and you can add/remove parts at any time. We wanted a management system more than an estimating system, but soo many of the ones we looked at were estimating systems that sort of did scheduling and management. With Presidio we actually started with their Job Control Module, and included Scheduling & Shipping and nothing else.
2. You have the option of buying outright or paying month-month subscription with no locked in contract. This was especially appealing because we could try the software for a bit and not be locked into a huge investment if it didn't work. When we decided that this was indeed the program we wanted, my boss did the math, and decided that month-month was WAY better cost wise in the long run. And actually, it seems they prefer that option anyways.
3. Job Control was COMPLETELY customizable. There are only a few things that we have found that it can't do. And the guys have been really GREAT about fielding suggestions. Some things can be changed right away, some things we have suggested have been changed in the main software release for everyone.
4. The support was really good. They respond quickly everytime I have had any problems and have been great!

Down to how we use it in the shop...
The Job Control we use as a digital job ticket, we could customize it with fields and info specific to our shop. It's basic, but works pretty good for a shop that is transitioning from all hand written job tickets. I did have to customize it a good bit on our end to print out the job tickets in a format my boss liked, although there really wasn't anything wrong with their canned ticket. But one of the main things my boss wanted was for the ticket to look and layout almost identical to what our handwritten tickets did. I also dabble in web development and database management, so I was able to use Crystal Reports to modify the report with a bit of help from the support guys to get the result we wanted.

The Shipping has been great for deliveries and such. It also can link with UPS to feed tracking info right back into the software. The shipping tickets and such are much easier to customize, it uses Microsoft Word data merge files to generate the forms, which (as long as the job ticket is filled out correctly) has GREATLY reduced delivery errors. They'll create your first one for you, and help at anytime as you're customizing your own. With my coding background I was able to do really fancy stuff like automating Julien dating for one customer so that our shipping girls didn't have to try to figure it out everytime. It also has some neat features that will auto figure box counts and labels needed based on what you put in for total quantity, and per box quantity. It even auto figures if you'll have a partial box.

The Scheduling has been a great help although some of our department heads are struggling with using it. When you generate a job, you create what they call "milestones" it's job lines for the different departments the job will be going through, you can schedule date, length of time the job will take in each department, and add notes specific to the department. Then in the scheduling section, each department as their own schedule where they can see upcoming unscheduled jobs, "past due" jobs, and what the upcoming schedule is. you can also pull a report (if you are using the job time) with a department schedule load that will show you how much of the allotted daily time is scheduled. so that you can plan over time, or adjust things.

the other modules that they have that we don't use are estimating, paper inventory management (it has a daily report that you can pull for what paper you need to order for upcoming jobs), job time management and logging, Quickbooks integration, Web-to-Print system integration, I think there was a bunch more, but I can't remember them all off the top of my head.

One of the slight drawbacks, is that each department then needed a workstation computer to access the system, and there isn't any remote access for it. Neither was a huge issue for my shop. The software is very light on a computer, and we had a bunch of older retired PCs that we used. For any computer that is going to be generating shipping tickets and labels you need to have full version Word.

We have tried so many systems, even had the magnetic "job Board" and this has been a great improvement over everything else we have tried. If you have any other questions, feel free to drop me a message.

 

[Keith]

Craig, thank you for the reply. How exactly do you use Morning Flight and Trello to schedule work?

In Morning Flight, I presume that you are using the due date and order tracker. Can you go into more detail?

In Trello, how do you layout cards on the board? Do you use a timeline or just the basic board? Do you setup different departments, operators or machines and put cards onto these items? How do you plan out the work, what decisions do you make? How do you get the data from Morning Flight into Trello?


Stephen Marsh

I would like to help with this one. Like Craig, I use Morning Flight and Trello. With only one employee, the price of those full MIS systems with optional espresso maker are just not financially practical for my shop and can actually be a bit burden-some with their gazillion features. I think this can be said of any system but sometimes I feel like I spend more time "managing" than producing actual work.

Since I started using Trello, I stopped using the tracking in Morning Flight. My employee loves Trello. Orders are simply keyed in, only takes 30 seconds. Job specs are all in Morning Flight. We take the job ticket and match up the number that has been keyed into Trello and look in there for any additional info, usually customer provided copy that I had pasted in there from my email. My designer/prepress technician with copy and paste the info from Trello. I'm getting off track here, sorry.

Trello uses a system of cards that can be customized. We divide it up by department:

Design
Awaiting OK
Prepress
Press/Send out
Post Press
Delivery/pickup
On hold/awaiting something

I used to have a couple of cards for Quotes and Follow Up but Morning Flight actual does pretty good at letting you print out a list of estimates so you can follow up. For stuff that hasn't gotten into Morning Flight yet for whatever reason, I have a color coding system in my email (I use Thunderbird).

As for scheduling, I've given up. Like Kansasquaker, we manage by due date. It seems whenever a customer asks for a turn around time I'm always wrong. So I just ask when they need it. Whenever I would sit down and plan my day out, the phone would ring and change all that. Was it General Douglas MacArthur that said, "Plan you battle strategy and when you get out on the battlefield, throw it out."? Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Stephen~
We schedule by press, then by due date, but we do try to gang up runs with similar colors, or int he case of the 4-color work, coatings and papers.

The Scheduling has been a great help although some of our department heads are struggling with using it. When you generate a job, you create what they call "milestones" it's job lines for the different departments the job will be going through, you can schedule date, length of time the job will take in each department, and add notes specific to the department. Then in the scheduling section, each department as their own schedule where they can see upcoming unscheduled jobs, "past due" jobs, and what the upcoming schedule is. you can also pull a report (if you are using the job time) with a department schedule load that will show you how much of the allotted daily time is scheduled. so that you can plan over time, or adjust things.

Hi Alith7, thank you for the detailed reply.

Just so that I understand things correctly, you have purchased a modular system, however you did not purchase the estimating modules, just some of the production modules. You have to manually enter time against milestones, as there was never a quote to provide timelines. I presume that if you did have the quote module, then your orders would inherit the estimated times and you would not have to enter expected times.

How do you actually put jobs on the departmental timeline? Drag and drop? Hit a button that automatically adds the jobs various timelines/milestones onto the board?

What I am really interested in is how the production manager actually plans out the work. Do people plan forwards to the due date, or backwards from due date? What decisions do they make etc.

Let’s say for example that there is a simple digital job for production. There are only three components to plan onto a schedule timeline:

(1) Art Dept. Preflight - 15 minutes; (2) Print Dept. Digital Print Run - 1 hour; (3) Finishing Dept. Trimming - 10 minutes.

The job has been accepted for the standard 3 day turn around.

With a visual tracking board system, one can see a timeline and jobs in various departments taking up allocated blocks of time. This way operator and machine loading is obvious, making it easy to judge capacity.

I would like to see the load report, this sounds exactly like the custom report that I have written to help “pre-plan” work by due date and departmental or operator or machine load. I’ll send you a PM.

Thanks again!


Stephen Marsh

 

[Alith7]

Stephen~
it says I can't send you a PM because your inbox is full...
But the basics was that I will send you some info and screen shots on Monday.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Stephen~
it says I can't send you a PM because your inbox is full...
But the basics was that I will send you some info and screen shots on Monday.

Thanks, I have cleared up some space in the PM inbox.

I am looking forward to seeing some screen shots.


Stephen Marsh

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Alith7, I hope that my inbox is now clear, I can’t see any messages from you. Did you get my PM with my email address?

Does anybody else have any info to share on how they decide which operations and which jobs get planned in a particular sequence in order to meet the job due date?


Stephen Marsh

 

[MayaKowalczyk]

Before I became an office plankton, I didn’t pay attention to how my work day was going. But after a couple of hard weeks I realized that I simply didn’t have enough time to complete all the tasks. Therefore it was necessary to make plans for the working day. First, I make a list of tasks that need to be completed in a day (I even bought myself a special notebook for planning the day https://onplanners.com/planners/best-hourly-planners.), then I set priorities for things that I should do, if it turns out - I write down how much time I should spend on this or that matter. But of course, you shouldn’t do several things at the same time, because, as a result, it will not be fully implemented.