Gantt Charts in Engineer-to-Order Manufacturing
In most manufacturing plants, production scheduling entails the scheduling of work orders in such a way that the customer demand for products is matched against the available capacity of machines and operators on the shopfloor.
This scheduling is usually done on a week-by-week, or sometimes, day-by-day basis and has as a goal to smoothen fluctuations in demand in order to avoid either too little or too much ongoing work (a.k.a. WIP) on the shopfloor. Production scheduling becomes more complicated when priorities change, rush orders are frequent, setup times are large or the number of product variations increases. In these cases, some level of automation or digital support can significantly increase the productivity of planners.
In Engineer-to-Order (ETO) companies, planning comes with yet another level of complexity. These ETO manufacturers make unique products based on specific customer requirements and work in a somewhat different way than other manufacturing companies:
- First of all, almost every product is unique and requires an engineering phase, prior to production. During this phase, there is a back-and-forth between the engineering team and the customer before production can start.
- The scope of activities extends beyond mere production. Besides the engineering phase mentioned above, engineer-to-order companies are often involved in the transport and the onsite installation of the manufactured goods as well.
- For these reasons, production orders are often handled as projects within these ETO manufacturing companies.
Examples of engineer-to-order industries include:
- Industrial equipment and heavy machinery.
- Large infrastructure projects building unique structures such as commercial buildings, bridges, or other major construction projects.
- Shipbuilding such as the design and construction of unique vessels, including luxury yachts,
- Aerospace and Defense Manufacturing.
From a planning perspective, Engineer-to-Order companies benefit from complementing production scheduling with a Gantt Chart to manage the timeline and dependencies of the overall project.
Gantt Charts are a well known and widely used project management tool that brings the following benefits:
- Visualize all tasks and subtasks against the project time frame.
- Time-centric insight into the progress of each task.
- Visualize dependencies between tasks and the impact on the overall project timeline if tasks and subtask are delayed.
- Assign responsible persons or teams to each of the tasks.
- Monitor the progress of a project.
24Flow offers both resource scheduling for production as well as Gantt Chart scheduling for the overall project management in Engineer-to-Order companies. 24Flow’s Gantt chart offers the following key benefits:
- Integration with the ERP system such that new projects are automatically synced.
- Intuitive visual project planning where different phases such as engineering, production, transport and onsite installation can all be modelled, together with all applicable subtasks.
- Hierarchy and dependency modeling with milestones such that project progress can be monitored and early warnings are available when timelines start drifting.
- Integration with production scheduling & shopfloor execution such that real-time feedback on the actual status is available to planners.
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24Flow is a modular manufacturing platform that empowers make-to-order manufacturers to reduce lead times and increase visibility & traceability. Inspired by lean and QRM, 24Flow controls the flow of production orders which increases visibility and results in shorter lead times, improved delivery reliability and a reduction of work-in-progress and inventory.
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