UNIVERSITY of SAN CARLOS – TECHNOLOGICAL CENTER

Nasipit, Talamban, 6000 Cebu City, Philippines

A Research Assignment on
Scheduling in Operations Management

Submitted By:
Vasnani, Neelesh Naresh
Schedule: MWF 3:30 – 4:30pm LB248TC
BSIE 3rd year student

Submitted to:
Engr. Christine Ocampo
IE 323 – Operations Management Instructor
Department of Industrial Engineering

Submitted on or before:
March 27, 2015
Scheduling in Operations Management

It is basically synonymous to the time management of a company’s operations, or

production system. It refers to what a company does to develop the timing of the use of their
equipment, employees, and other resources and facilities required to run the organization.

Scheduling occurs in every organization, whether it is a small firm or big organization, and
is usually a vital step taken at the final part of the business cycle. It may not seem obvious, but
every type of organization has scheduling involved. Some examples are hospitals, law-firms,
repair shops, retail outlets, factories, production lines and many more. It is amusing to notice
that these examples cover both service and manufacturing environments, proving that
scheduling occurs in both of these settings.

To further appreciate the importance and details of Scheduling in Operations

Management, a set of seven (7) questions are answered below.

1. Why is scheduling fairly simple for continuous systems but fairly complex for job shops?

In continuous or high volume systems, there is uniformity in the system or process. This
means that there are standardized equipment and activities that lead to similar operations done
to the product or process. This standardization leads to high utilization, easy task allocation as
well as the time allocation involved in scheduling. Moreover, since everything happens in sort of
a cycle, managers and decision makers find it easy to schedule the activities. Real world
applications usually include technological industries like appliances, autos, computers, and
radios. There also process inclined continuous systems like refineries and waste plants.

On the contrary, Job shops or low volume systems are fairly complex when it comes to
scheduling. This is because of its customized nature – they have to handle a wider range of
production requirements. This customization comes in factors like rush orders, specifications

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changes, and short planning horizons. Due to this variation, the jobs follow different paths
through the shop which ultimately impacts the processing time, which then has obvious effects
on scheduling, making it more complicated then continuous systems. Job shop applications
include fabrication, grinding, casting and other small scaled manufacturing shops.

High Volume Production Job Shop Production (Fabrication)

2. What are the main decision areas of job shop scheduling?

The two main decision areas of job shop scheduling are loading and sequencing. Loading can
be viewed as the first step - it is basically assigning the jobs to various work centers and machines.
This decision area involves simply organizing the jobs, but it can get difficult if there is a limited
number of work areas to work with, and many jobs at hand. To tackle this, managers use
systematic ways like the Gantt chart (to be discussed further in the next question).

Now that it is determined which jobs go to which work center, it’s time for the second
decision area, sequencing. Sequencing involves making decisions pertaining to the order in which
the jobs are to be carried out on the work centers, something not covered by the loading
decisions. Sequencing is also done systematically using priority rules, which will be discussed in
the impending questions.

Both of these scheduling decisions are very important to any job shop. For example, in repair
shops, wherein there are tasks like cleaning, replacing, disassembling, and testing the parts, it is
important to allocate these to the proper workstations, in most cases you will not get a separate

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station for each job. Now since there are tasks that need the previous task to be completed, it is
mandatory that you develop an order, through sequencing that matches your loading decisions,
to ultimately save and utilize time.

3. What are Gantt charts? How are they used in scheduling? What are the advantages of
Gantt charts?

The Gantt chart is named after by Henry Gantt who pioneered the use of this chart for
industrial scheduling long back in the 1900s. When it was developed back then, industrial
companies used to see it as a revolutionary tool, but now almost all companies use it as a basic
scheduling tool. These charts are basically visual aids for easing scheduling tasks revolving around
the time framework. Gantt charts illustrate the start and finish times of the terminal elements
and summary elements of a project. Below is an application of a Gantt chart for a simple project.

Gantt charts are used by managers to plan and adjust facility and equipment loading and
scheduling. Managers use these charts to for trial and error schedule development to get an idea
of what different arrangements would involve. There are two types of Gantt charts in used in
operations management, the load chart, and the schedule chart. The load chart shows the
loading and idle times of a group of machines or processes. The schedule chart is similar to the
conventional Gantt chart shown above, it shows whether or not the jobs in process are on
schedule. Below is an example of a Load chart showing the job assignment to the work centers.

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 The Gantt chart has many advantages. The advantages of Gantt charts include ease of
manipulation, the fact that they provide a visual model of loading, and the ability to assist in trial
and error changes. The disadvantages include the need to repeatedly update the chart, the
inability to reveal costs associated with different alternatives and the inability to include other
details (such as processing items which are dependent on the equipment being used rather than
the same regardless of the equipment being used).

4. Briefly describe each of these priority rules.

 FCFS – The first come, first served rule wherein jobs are processed in order in which
they arrive at the work center/machine. It may be bad because long tasks can take up
all the time, delaying the rest.
 SPT – The Shortest Processing time rule wherein the shortest jobs are processed first.
This works nicely since it can cover many jobs quickly.
 DD – The Due date rule, wherein jobs with the earliest due date are processed first.
 S/O – The Slack per operation rule wherein the jobs are processed according to the
average slack time. Slack time can be computed as time until due date minus
remaining time to process. The S/O is then computed by dividing the slack time by the
current number of operations. The jobs with smaller S/O are done first.
 Rush – In this priority rule, jobs with emergency or preferred customers are done first.
This is common in small scaled job shops.

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5. Why are priority rules needed?

Different companies set different targets and goals for their jobs. To accompany these, the
priority rules are used. Each of these priority rules focus on a high output on one particular
aspect, and they have tradeoffs for the rest, so it is important to identify what your main goal is
for the task or project. Priority rules allow for the fact that jobs are not equally important:
different processing sequences will have different consequences for the organization. Priority
rules enable an organization to emphasize those measures of effectiveness deemed most
important. Furthermore, if you don’t have any priority measure, you will have mixed and random
forms of deficits in many aspects, rather than limited loss in one or two aspects. Priority rules
therefore are very important; since a company can’t have everything perfect, they can follow
these systematic ways to focus on their primary objectives. The cool part is that they can
conveniently choose and switch among these rules if they change their targeted objective.
Famous CEO Warren Buffet has also said the setting priorities is one of the keys to success for
any business.

6. How are scheduling and productivity related?

To the extent that scheduling efforts can achieve a balance in facility or equipment loading,
the amount of output for a given amount of input will be higher than it otherwise would, and
hence, productivity will be higher than otherwise. Conversely, poor scheduling will adversely
affect productivity because it will not enable maximum use of resources. For instance, since
scheduling mainly focuses on minimizing time (it also minimizes other inputs) as an input, the
productivity is already impacted since the lower your input, the higher your productivity(for a
constant output at least, if not higher).

7. Explain the term makespan.

Makespan is the total time needed to complete a group of jobs from the beginning of the
first job to the completion of the last job. In equation form:
Makespan = Time of completion of last job - Starting time of the first job