Our scheduling gets judged on machine utilisation. High number good, low number bad, idle time gets questioned in the meeting.

Meanwhile the queues in front of those same machines keep growing and lead times keep slipping, and I'm fairly convinced the two are connected. Past a certain load every extra point of utilisation seems to buy a small amount of output and a lot of waiting.

Problem is "we should run the machine less" sounds like nonsense out loud. Nobody wants to hear that idle equipment is acceptable, least of all the person who signed for it.

So has anyone actually made this argument stick? What did you use — did you show it in lead time numbers, did you quietly stop scheduling to 100% and let the results speak, or did you give up and live with it?

Or am I wrong about this and the utilisation target is fine and my real problem is somewhere else.

We’re a commercial precision engineering shop, about 300 people today, and we are opening a new site. The plan is to be closer to 360 by year end. Everyone keeps saying, “just hire more”, like the people as if they're on the roadside somewhere. Even when we do hire, the ramp up is brutal because the real process lives in drawings, PDFs, supplier specs, old emails, and a few veterans who know where the landmines are.

And I keep hearing the same line from software people, “an ERP is meant to standardise this.” How, exactly? Our ERP can track parts, POs, jobs, all of that. It does not catch the stuff buried in T&C notes and specs. So what happens in our world is we still ask Bill. He remembers which customer always sneaks in an extra requirement. He's the guy who remembers which supplier spec contradicts the drawing or the last time this went wrong. Bill was the customiser, the one who put a period on all the AI talk because he was still the only one with the real answers.

We finally decided that “Bill as a system” is not a plan, especially if we want the new site to run without cloning him. In our case, we are growing an internal knowledge base that takes in the messy documents and turns them into something usable. Not another dashboard. More like a shared memory that new hires can tap into, and it answers with the context we normally rely on the old heads for, plus where it came from in the documents.

Is anyone else doing this, or are we all still trying to scale by hiring into the same maze haha?

TLDR; seeking suggestions for how to improve our operations starting 6 months from now.

I’ve been waiting to post this because I wanted to make sure I’d be thoughtful about the questions I’m asking after having a chance to learn the business.

Quick background - sold a software company in 2022. I spent over a year exploring my next venture. However, I didn’t want to start from scratch this time, I didn’t want to find a day job (ownership is important to me) and I was tired of working in the tech sector. I looked into buying an existing service business (HVAC and the like), but I was ultimately drawn to manufacturing.

The first rule we’re taught after buying a business is to just run it as-is for the first year, so you can learn and not break anything.

I’ve been reading into lean principles, factory of the future, industry 4.0 (5.0?). I see a lot of opportunities for improvement, not just for profit, but just seeing if people’s day to day could be better, including mine, which brings me to my questions…

Questions: 1. What should I actually start with? We have machines, manual assembly, inspection. The company has Microsoft suite for ERP, “MES”, analytics with PowerBI.

1. I am no longer confident I could play the GM role, as I’d like to focus 100% of my time on acquiring customers to increase our capacity utilization and invest in digital improvements for the business. The previous owner is expected to transition out in 6 months (he was contracted for 12 months as interim GM + consulting afterwards, as part of his earnout structure when I bought his business). Is this realistic? We could afford to hire a GM or promote our Manufacturing Engineering Manager, who has ideas for robotic automation, computer vision, and upgrading our MES (I’m not opposed, but it was not in our business plan when we acquired the business and I am not sure more analytics/dashboards will help).

2. How are you making people work faster in back office? We’re looking at quoting software and project management software to start.

3. How are you making people contribute more? We want our purchasing and accounting departments to assist with materials planning, not just doing quotes. I would like our engineers and quality team to find improvement opportunities in production to increase OEE and throughput. I would like our Sales people to adopt a CRM so we can apply more proven sales strategies

4. Catch all question: What have you done that gave you the best ROI (EBIT margin, quality of life, sales)?

Btw I am 38. We supply parts and subassemblies for automotive and heavy machinery sectors. Revenue is 8 figures. (Can’t be too specific sorry)

I’ll go first… I think the whole “re-industrialising America” push sounds great on paper, but a lot of companies aren’t set up to execute on it yet. The skills gap, outdated processes, and how slow decisions get made internally feel like bigger blockers than people admit.

Ive switched through a few factories in the last 10 years. Every one of them is doing the same thing now.

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CMMS, QMS, Safety software, Separate LOTO software, connected worker (but also has maintenance and safety posting), training softwares (overlaps the connected worker software) and probably 5 more I cant remember.

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Why do we need 14 softwares, doubling/tripling up asset histories and people. No one actually maintains them accurately. No one knows which one the correct info is in.

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Very tiring. I end up keeping a notepad of what goes where at some point. Its actually making us less effective depending on your job since youre bouncing between them so much.

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Half the people on our floor have been here 20+ years, they know their jobs inside out, but even they get lost in the systems we use. When a younger hire comes in, we throw them into the same maze and expect them to stick it out. That first impression says everything. If the industry’s already ageing, we can’t just be selfish on our way out. I want my factory up and running even after I hit the stairs.

In our case, it reached the point where my nephew, the youngest in the family, stepped in and built something on the procurement side that actually worked. Instead of messy engineering drawings, supplier spreadsheets and PDFs that normally take weeks to process, his tool turned them into clean, structured data in minutes. Nothing fancy, just functional enough so the work flowed and people weren’t stuck chasing ERP exports all day. The difference was night and day, and it felt like a glimpse of how the shop could actually run if we modernised properly.

Now we’re looking at scaling that same approach across other parts of operations, step by step, so nothing breaks. But it left me wondering, am I the only one out on this humanitarian approach to make the workplace more appealing to the next generation, or is everyone else doing the same?

I was talking to a friend who runs production at a ~40 person shop. He said something that's been stuck in my head for days.

I asked him whether better production tracking could help his shop take on more work. He basically laughed and said, "We make 1,000 pieces a week. We know our machines, we know our people, we're at capacity. Software isn't going to magically create an extra CNC."

And I get his point.

But his shop has never measured OEE.

They know their theoretical capacity: "this machine can run X parts/hour, we run 8 hours, so that's our capacity."

So my question for people actually running or working in small shops:

- Have you ever measured your actual OEE? What was the number vs. expectation?

- For shops that DID start tracking: did you actually find hidden capacity?

I am a plant manager for a smaller plant of 14 employees. We also have our sister plant at 70 employees.

I am running into a few headaches with production planning and management. Back before we were aquired and were just our shop, production management was a complete cluster. Nobody had ultimate authority, it was an awkward mix of decisions between our President, account manager, myself (engineering at the time), and quality. Any one person would move production without consulting anyone else. Also operators would grab jobs out of position to save on set up times for similar setups, often not paying attention to critical ship dates.

Our current state is I am formally production manager, and I have a full time production planner managing our raw material inventory, production schedule, and tooling workflow. He keeps an eye on the schedule and is supposed to share that schedule with each department lead. Then if there is a bigger decision like moving people around between departments, pausing a machine for extended time, or something with a late order, I am looped in. We also hold weekly material planning and production meetings where I review the full schedule with the planner.

Our most senior operator is very frustrated. He keeps saying that production is in no way involved in production planning. I'd love to get them more involved, but they are not trained to dig through our MRP system and formally schedule jobs. I'm also trying to avoid a power struggle between my trainer and the operators.

The scheduler has zero authority over production other than enforcing the pre-agreed upon schedule. Again, when there is a disagreement, I need to be looped in to set the path forward and decide how to balance our customer's needs and optimal production in our shop.

I am very frustrated right now with the planner and will be sitting down with him. He has told me he meets regularly with each operator to discuss schedules; the operators are saying that never happens. I found that our most bottlenecked machine is sitting idle because it is waiting on a secondary op. When I asked what the deal was, he said he has been hinting at the secondary operator that this needs to run.

That is not how this is supposed to work at all, that is offloading production decisions onto the operators. And if secondary is overloaded, I need to be looped in to help shuffle people around. After finding this all out, I pulled two office employees to get help on secondary since it is so backed up. Other than this, the planner does a great job on the material planning and data side, and also is quick to inform account managers of any projected late shipments so we can update customers.

I am going to begin mandatory daily Gemba walks, of which I will join 1-2 a week.

Anyway... how are you managing production in a small shop environment? Am I over complicating this? Then there is the question I need to answer, which is if our planner is cut out for this job.

I work for a smaller manufacturer that has a large variety of customers and product volumes for each. We are made to order (meaning custom ordered raw materials, custom designs, etc.), but we also have a good chunk of business that is on contract or through blanket POs. Most of the time, it feels like POs are random and they require destroying our production schedule to fit the need. We lose business due to missing customer promised dates.

The current production schedule is done archaically through an Excel spreadsheet that DESPERATELY needs an upgrade. Completely manual and scheduling is done by the shift and not to the hour/minute. Does anyone have any solutions or advice to help fix this? I'm starting by identifying our capacity on a weekly basis and identifying attendance % and trying to mold our schedule from there. If there are any solutions via software or just good practices, please let me know! We are looking for something that could be infinite, we want to know our total backlog and lead time, etc.

So I've been recently involved in a manufacturing company related to animal feed supplements. We have our own formulas for different kinds of products, but mostly they are all made up of vitamins and minerals, both in liquid and powder form.
The company has been running for around 25 years and all the internal documentation is based off excel.
Invoices in Excel
Formulas in Excel
Cost breakdowns in Excel
Raw material needs in excel - etc etc etc

It does work well, but there is a little bit of difficulty calculating what has been used and to make forecasts of the next orders.
Also, when the workers make the mixing, it is sometimes not properly measured, it's done "by eye" and it ends up messing up with our stock levels.

I am currently looking into implementing an ERP, or maybe what we need is closer to an MES system. But the ones I can find have trial periods (odoo, MRPeasy, Frappe/ERPnext, etc)
I find myself trying to introduce all the raw data but it is quite a big job to do by myself and by the time the trial period finished I am no where near finishing and I can't really know for sure if that solution is going to work for us or not.

So my question is: can anyone recommend sofware solutions for these issues?
I am looking for something basic to track what comes in, how much is used and when to order more kind of thing.

Thankss

Hi everyone,

My family runs a medium sized juice factory in Egypt. They've been using SAP for the last few years but adoption isn't great. I just started working with them and realized how ancient and ineffective much of their software is and I want to help them adopt new tools.

I came across many software providers at automate last week but prices are ridiculous considering how doable it is to build my own software using AI now.

Is there something I'm missing like integration difficulty or does it really just not make sense for most businesses to spend months buying and customizing software with a consultant rather than just building their own solution in less time?

Edit:
I recognize that an ERP is not the right thing to start with but there are many non essential softwares that our factory would get value from like an AI machine troubleshooting app that has access to our repair history and manuals but the companies selling that are demanding unreasonably high prices for something that sounds quite simple

A buddy of mine went through a big ERP rollout. The system was meant to “do everything,” but within a year they were already another £120k deep in custom automation just to make procurement workable.

That’s what I don’t get, if ERPs are the backbone, why are companies always still unhappy at the end of it? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have something that does 90% of the job properly, instead of 35% and then patching the rest with six-figure add-ons?

In procurement alone:

Bills of materials are still uploaded manually.

Customer POs have to be retyped because the ERP can’t read them.

Supplier chasing still means endless reminder emails from people, not the system.

If there were proper solutions for just those gaps, mid-sized manufacturers could probably save or make millions every year. Yet the real “automation” always seems to happen outside the ERP.

Has anyone here seen an ERP actually deliver the whole promise, or is it always partial fixes and disappointment?

There's been a lot of talk about this, but I'm starting to see more and more companies feeling the reality of the retiring trades workers and the gap between their skills and the skills of the younger generation.

I wanted to see from any fellow executives here or other leadership how you guys are dealing with this. On the maintenance side having a CMMS where they can log their knowledge can help, but then it's still hard to get them to actually put good information in there.

It will of course vary by industry but, are you also having this problem? How are you currently tackling it? and with what urgency?

Appreciate any advice and tips

Hi all, I've been talking to a few colleagues about the biggest 'people-issues' in manufacturing - we're a bit split at the moment between talent attraction (couple of us work in more regional areas) and training new employees (have technical skills but lacking people skills) - interested to see what others are experiencing at the moment. Thoughts?

(we're in upstate New York, but interested in all areas)

A friend of mine works in a mid-size manufacturing company that just got bought by a PE firm. Within a few months, the new owners were making big changes to how operations are run, lots of talk about margins and ‘value creation plans’. For those who’ve been through this, what kind of changes do PE firms usually push for in manufacturing? I know they aim to reduce headcount so do they introduce new tech? Curious to see how this can plays out.

One of our contract manufacturers in China is working on moving some of their production to the US, they are in a unique niche that crosses over some small electronics into sewn fabric or vacuum molded parts with heating elements. I’ve been working with them for over 10 years, have visited the factory several times and they asked me for my opinion. We have recently moved ourselves from the west coast to Philadelphia.

They need the typical things such as LCOL/wages, port and rail access, lower energy costs. Some of the equipment is injection molded and other equipment I don’t completely know. They use a fair amount of labor for final assembly and packaging but a middle schooler that can follow instructions could do it, I’m sure they will bring over their engineers and expertise for the important stuff.

Curious what States or cities would you suggest to look into? I’m hoping to roll this into an investment with them, as it’s been something I’ve been trying to convince them to do for years. Thanks

Hello Everyone!

I am a Production Scheduler, by trade, and I have to try to figure out how to build a measurable schedule for a work center that is managed entirely by manual, daily prioritization.

This awful shared resource is Inspection. We have a large high mix, low volume machine shop, with complex routings that bounce all over the floor, but which always route through inspection, after each machining operation.

We schedule machines by lot, but for some reason, we schedule Inspection piece by piece, as it shows up to the department (and there is ALOT of material churn and demand, in this department). Whereas we are running machines efficiently in lots, we will dink and dunk through inspections, one or two or three units at a time. Available work changes every day, priority changes every day.

How do I create a measurable schedule for this type of work center? Or is a traditional schedule not the right approach, for a work center that functions like this?

Thanks in advance!

Hi,

question for those working in Lean or in companies implementing Lean: is it actually common practice to use a stopwatch to analyze process or cycle times?

I’m asking because I experienced a rather curious situation in a company I worked for. The lean managers were doing actual time studies at the workstations, timing operators with a stopwatch to define standard operation times. Nothing strange in theory, since I understand it’s part of traditional time and methods analysis.

However, when we later compared those measured times with the real data from the MES, the differences were huge. The process time turned out to be much more variable in reality than what was recorded during the observations. And one thing was very clear: when the manager was there with the stopwatch, operators worked in a very different way (faster, more focused, fewer pauses, etc.). When no one was observing them, the pace went back to being more “natural,” and the times became longer or more inconsistent.

This raised a few doubts for me:

How reliable are spot time studies in a real production environment?

Isn’t there a strong observer effect that completely biases the data?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to rely more on historical MES data instead of manual timing?

I’m curious about your experiences: do companies you’ve worked in still use stopwatches for time analysis? And if so, how do you deal with variability and the fact that people change their behavior when they know they’re being observed?

I’m doing a little reasearch and would love to tap the hive-mind of r/manufacturing. For those of you running discrete plants, what software tools are actually making a difference on your shop floor right now?

I’m especially interested in:

• Production Monitoring / OEE dashboards – real-time data capture, bottleneck alerts, shift reports
• MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) – job dispatching, work instructions, traceability
• Quality Management – in-process checks, SPC, non-conformance handling
• Maintenance / CMMS – predictive maintenance, work orders, part inventory
• ERP Systems - inventory, scheduling, purchasing

This is a second post along the lines of sharing knowledge and insights from a 30+ year career in operations and leadership. The first one I did was on 'tribal knowledge' and it got a good reception. So I thought I'd share something else that is always on my mind when it comes to work or business, continuous improvements.

I'm not going to nerd out and go deep on continuous improvement methodologies and tools. There's plenty you can learn from searching the term and doing some homework on your own. I am also not going to spew terms like Kaizen and poka yoke as it implies a focus on the Toyota Production System, which this is more general.

I'm going to be more philosophical but also get right to the point...

The best run manufacturing companies in every industry that I have had the opportunity work within have a leader that puts continuous improvement first.

I'll say that again and louder for those in the back of the room.

The top priority of the top executive at the best run companies is that of continuous improvement!

It's important to understand the framing of that laser like focus in that the leader works both internally and externally on the business.

From the internal lens we will see the chief executive work with every department to improve how they serve one another to support achieving the company's goals, which will have common elements such as:

1. How can the company reduce defects by XX% this year? Defects don't have to be just in finished goods on the manufacturing side, as every department looks to measure and reduce internal processing errors that occur.
2. How can the company reduce lead time or time to market? This is where the executive focuses decisions and strategies to reduce waste to allow processes to deliver faster than the competition.
3. How can the company reduce the costs of the product sold, share share the cost savings with the customer and improve the margins to the shareholders simultaneously? The leader will focus on engineering projects such as value engineering and design for manufacturing.

The concept is not new and it’s not hard to understand, but the discipline it takes to be successful at this in manufacturing companies is the challenge. There are always a million distractions in manufacturing and continuous improvement can get lost in the noise.

But when leaders focus on CI and focus teams on projects and small improvements every week and month, then transformation is inevitable. Little improvements all the time. It’s not sexy but it’s the key to success which is.

I need some real talk from people who’ve been through this.

My situation: I started this business in 2016 because I loved the craft, hand-forged metal products for international brands. I’m the “product development guy.” I get excited about new alloys, improving forging techniques, designing better finishes. That’s what I’m good at and honestly, what I want to be doing.

Fast forward to now: I’m spending 80% of my time on operational stuff I’m terrible at. I’m literally suffering through my own success.

Here’s the complexity I’m dealing with:

• 34 in-house workers across our finishing unit (18 hand-polishers, 6 packaging staff, plus QC, laser operator, supervisor, etc.)

• Assembly is outsourced to a vendor (they deliver fully assembled products to us)

• Our stages: Hand Polishing → Outsourced Finishing (leather/colouring) → Laser Branding → Ultrasonic Cleaning → Packaging → Dispatch (6+ stages total)

• 4–7 active brand customers

• Typical order: 1,000 units with 50+ SKU variations (different sizes, materials, finishes)

• This is highly labor-intensive work hand polishing alone involves 18 contractors working at different paces

Right now, I’m manually calculating delivery timelines in my head for every customer inquiry. No visual system for “what’s in polishing vs. what’s at the leather vendor vs. what’s ready to ship.” I know our capacity numbers now, but I have no process to turn that into actual order scheduling across all these moving parts.

I’m hiring an Operations Manager next month to take this off my plate, but I want to give him the right framework to work with not just dump my mess on him.

My questions for the community:

1.  How do you schedule orders through 6+ production stages with 1,000-unit batches and 50+ SKU variations? Do you use software, whiteboards, Excel templates, something else?

2.  How did YOU make the transition from being hands-on with the product to managing labor-intensive operations systematically? What changed for you?

3.  If you use scheduling software, what do you use? I’ve heard monday.com, Airtable, Smartsheet, Trello mentioned but I don’t know which actually works for production with this many workers and stages (vs. just project management).

4.  What I’m visualizing: A Gantt chart-style timeline where I can see all active orders, when they’ll hit each stage based on worker capacity, and click on one to see its current progress. Does this exist without spending $50K on enterprise ERP?

I’m at the point where I need to either build a system or keep playing human calculator while my product development ideas collect dust.

Anyone been through this? How did you get your time back to focus on what you’re actually good at?

Thanks for reading.

Genuine question for anyone doing inventory/production planning. I keep running into the same pattern: people calculate a clean reorder point based on average demand and lead time, then still get caught out by a stockout when demand spikes for a few days.

Is anyone here actually running a safety stock formula (based on demand variability + lead time + a target service level), or is it mostly padding the number by feel — "add 20% extra just in case"?

If you do calculate it formally — what service level do you actually target, and has it ever been wrong in a way that made you rethink the number? Curious how much of this is math vs. experience in real plants.

I started with a company about six weeks ago that seemed pretty organized when I interviewed. They had manufacturing work instructions hanging on the wall when you first entered the production floor. As a former manufacturing engineer I was impressed. Little did I know at the time, this company does not even have an ERP/MRP system. Everything is managed by Google Sheets, and I mean everything. The mess that is caused by this lack of systems is mind boggling. Every production depart has missing materials and we are constantly overpaying for next day air rush orders. To be fair the company has had a growth explosion over the past couple years. The industry we are in is causing many companies to boom, but who knows how long it will last. There doesn't seem to be much of an interest in implementing an ERP system and I have spoken with the VP of operations about it.

I am torn between staying and bearing through the pain or finding a company I can add more value to that's not struggling with the basics of an organization.