Production Planning
& Scheduling
A constraint-aware planning system that turns current work-in-process into practical daily and weekly execution priorities.
A daily production plan could take hours to build and become obsolete almost immediately.
The facility's legacy planning software required supervisors to manually enter and manage work orders across multiple operations, repeatedly include or exclude routing steps, and update plans throughout the day when work did not move as expected.
For me, the process typically consumed four to six hours on Monday, two to three hours on most midweek days, and another three to four hours on Friday to plan ahead. The software was also unstable and did not account cleanly for staffing capacity, expected operation spans, or several constraints supervisors managed manually.
I replaced the repeated manual planning work with a refreshable model: paste current WIP, run the planner, review feasibility, and adjust only where judgment is needed.
One master schedule, with each layer doing one job.
The schedule understands that work can leave the department and still belong to the plan.
Routing spans are encoded so work orders temporarily disappear from actionable work while they are expected elsewhere, then return to the schedule when that external span should be complete.
Automate the planning load, not the supervisor's judgment.
Formula, formatting, prioritization, and VBA implementation were developed with AI assistance. I defined the operational parameters, work-center scope, routing behavior, span logic, constraints, planning goals, and validation criteria.
Planning moved from a recurring time sink to a short review process.
My routine planning work dropped from approximately 13–19 hours per week to roughly 5–10 minutes per day under normal conditions. The system also makes aged inventory, late returns, expected throughput, and missed assignments easier to see.
The original workbook is proprietary. The operating logic is documented.
These portfolio views are reconstructed from the scheduler's documented architecture using synthetic work orders. They show the structure of the system without reproducing production data.
Reconstruction note: the original system used modular VBA, including separate routing, leveling, capacity, weekly, daily-dispatch, pipeline, ESH, output, and orchestration modules. The portfolio visuals above reproduce the documented architecture and decision logic, not the original production workbook.
TECHNICAL DEEP DIVE Read the Technical Overview Architecture · Scheduling Logic · Route Semantics · Exception Handling · Controls · VBA Implementation