Mentor Blogs

Production Schedules….Scheduled! – “General Guidelines”   In this post, I’d like to review some basic guidelines that most production planners and schedulers seem to agree upon.  Not meant to be the cure-all defacto standard, but based on polling several factories of various sizes and strategy seems to be a core list. 1)     Plan the schedule to ensure up to 99% capacity of the bottleneck operation … Read More

Scheduling, Production Planning, EMS

“Strategic Alignment” There are many variables the influence meeting production schedules.  One of which is factory strategic alignment. The goals of a factory are heavily influenced by the incentive programs deployed in the factory.  These incentives should be driven by that organization’s competitive strategy in their markets.  Are they focused on advanced technology, low-cost producer, highest … Read More

Scheduling, Production Planning

Production planning is a dynamic problem to solve, as the variables seem infinite. As more and more global regions move to high-mix with increasing volume production, the planning task of running multiple products effectively through existing assets and resources poses a significant scheduling challenge. Manufacturing plants today are challenged with shipping the required quantity of products on time, … Read More

Scheduling, Production Planning

For the final installment of this series on components, I will discuss the solution that the Valor Division has for dynamic build order management. One of the neglected areas of PCB manufacturing is being able to sequence and then react to the day to day challenges of meeting production goals. For example, when many different products needs to be built, on multiple lines, with different configurations … Read More

PCB assembly, Scheduling, BOM, Sequence, Planning