Most plants schedule every line the same way, on the same horizon, with the same rules. It feels fair. It also guarantees that the one line limiting output will sometimes sit idle while others build inventory nobody needs yet.
Find the constraint, then protect it
The constraint is the line whose hours set the plant’s output. Schedule it first, keep a small buffer of work in front of it, and plan everything else to keep that buffer full. The rest of the plant can afford idle time; the constraint can’t.
Replace expediting with a daily review
Expediting is the symptom of a schedule nobody trusts. A fifteen-minute daily review of the constraint — what ran, what is next, what is at risk — removes most of the reasons to expedite, and gives planners their time back.
An hour lost at the constraint is an hour lost for the whole plant.
From the work · PRV-011
Sample data
On-time delivery ·
Industrial components manufacturer
Before
81%
+16 pts
After
97%
Scheduling the bottleneck first across three plants lifted on-time delivery in sixteen weeks.
Source
Plant MES data, 8-week rolling averages.
Illustrative sample data. Provan, its people, clients, figures and sources are fictional and shown for demonstration only.