scheduling strategy in operations management
Introduction Scheduling is a very important area of operation management. Effective scheduling can yield cost savings and increases in productivity. It is fundamentally different for manufacturing industries and service industries. For manufacturing industries, it involves processing jobs in an ideal sequence to meet the due dates, to minimize the flow time and thus reduce the associated cost and also to reduce tardiness. There are a few rules guiding the scheduling sequences in manufacturing industries, especially for job-shop scheduling, like first come first served, shortest processing time etc. In service industries however, it is more concerned with scheduling the workforce to yield the optimal service with the least cost. Appropriate number of workers should be employed to meet the customer’s demand and they should be scheduled in such a way that there will not be any shortage of labours during peak hours or excess of labours during off-peak hours. Off days should also be scheduled properly such that the workers will not feel dissatisfied which in turn affect their performance. Literature review In the past three years, there are about 20 articles published on scheduling, they cover both manufacturing and service industries. For manufacturing industries, many articles focused on the improvement of scheduling in supply chains while the rest tried to formulate some equations that minimize the total cost and tardiness for some complicated situations within the companies.