Learn the Craft
Product-agnostic education in production scheduling — finite vs infinite capacity, constraint-based scheduling, sequence-dependent setup, and the rest of the craft. Useful whether or not you run Business Central.
What Is Production Scheduling? (And Why It's Not Planning)
Production scheduling assigns operations to machines and minutes, not just dates. What separates a schedule from a plan, and where scheduling lives.
Finite vs Infinite Capacity Scheduling, Explained Properly
What infinite-capacity scheduling does and does not do, why it double-books machines, and what a finite scheduler guarantees instead - with a worked example.
What Is an APS (Advanced Planning & Scheduling) System?
A plain-language definition of Advanced Planning and Scheduling, where it sits between ERP and the shop floor, what it actually does, and where its limits are.
Why MRP Is Not a Schedule
MRP tells you what to make and roughly when. It never decides which job runs first on a shared machine. The exact gap, and why more MRP runs won't close it.
Forward vs Backward Scheduling: When Each One Lies to You
Backward scheduling can compute a start date in the past. Forward scheduling can finish weeks late. Both failure modes, with a worked timeline.
Constraint-Based Scheduling: How Modern Solvers Model a Factory
How a solver turns machines, operations, and shift calendars into mathematics - intervals, no-overlap, cumulative capacity - and why soft constraints matter.
Scheduling Algorithms: From Dispatch Rules to Exact Solvers
A practitioner's taxonomy of scheduling algorithms - dispatch rules, heuristics, metaheuristics, exact solvers - what each promises, and how to read vendor claims.
Sequence-Dependent Setup: The Changeover Matrix Explained
Why job order changes how much time you lose to changeover, how an asymmetric matrix models it, and why sequencing blind to due dates backfires.
Modeling Real Capacity: Shifts, Calendars, and Parallel Machines
Why a '40-hour week' is fiction: how parallel machines, efficiency, and calendars set real capacity, and why bad schedules trace back to a capacity model that lied.
Bottlenecks, Drum-Buffer-Rope, and Theory of Constraints
What a bottleneck actually is, why an hour lost there is an hour lost for the whole plant, and what drum-buffer-rope means for scheduling around it.
Measuring a Schedule: OTIF, Tardiness, and Utilization
The KPIs planners use to judge a schedule — OTIF, tardiness, makespan, utilization, adherence — and why every schedule is a weighted trade-off, not one number.
Plan Stability: Frozen Horizons and Schedule Nervousness
Why a mathematically better schedule can be operationally worse, what a frozen horizon protects against, and how often a shop should actually reschedule.
What-If Scheduling and Capable-to-Promise (CTP)
How scenario analysis compares hypothetical changes against a live baseline, and how capable-to-promise turns today's real capacity into an honest ship-date quote.
Lot Splitting, Overlapping, and Transfer Batches
Why one big batch on one machine can miss a due date that splitting or overlapping the same work would hit, and what each approach costs in return.
When People Are the Constraint: Labor-Limited Scheduling
Why machines and people are two independent constraints, and why a labor shortage often only becomes visible once the whole schedule is viewed together.