What are your Scheduling/Planning Considerations?

I am interested in what your company uses to help plan work in order to meet the due date. This scheduling/planning info could be for any department, however may be focussed on print and or finishing, or perhaps even taking outsourcing into account.

I have searched the forum for past discussions and from my own experience have found that the following considerations are the most common:

1) Order Due Date (or more to the point, a set date before the order due date to ensure that the true due date is met)

2) Total expected labour time for all jobs in a certain department that fall before a certain date in order to evaluate department or machine loading

3) Jobs on press that use the same colours to reduce make ready and wash up etc (running two jobs back to back that may be say CMYK+Spot 485 red etc.

So, what do you do? How do you plan your work? What tools or methods help you to do this? Do you have job ganging software that factors in due date or other info such as specific ink colours? Do you run reports from an MIS/ERP? If you do run MIS reports, what content is in them - can you post a sample of such a report that you find useful?

I have not worked in a production planning role, so even basic tips are appreciated. Thanks in advance.


Stephen Marsh