Si-Scheduling
A rush job lands at 9am. Nothing else goes late.
The schedule builds itself from your routings, finds the opening, and puts the work on a machine that can hold it and a machinist qualified to run it.
Then it tells the estimator what you can honestly promise — today, on this load.
The pain
The schedule is right until about ten past seven.
It is not that nobody can build a schedule. It is that the shop moves faster than anyone can rebuild one.
The hot job
A customer calls. You say yes, because you always say yes. Then you work out what it just broke.
The one who can run it
Three machines could take the job. One machinist is signed off on the process, and he is on nights.
“Four to six weeks”
The lead time you quote everybody, because working out the real one takes an afternoon you do not have.
How it works
It reschedules. It does not just report.
Every scheduler will show you a job is behind. This one moves the work.
It finds the slot
The rush job goes where it actually fits — around setups, shifts and the jobs already promised.
It matches the person
Machine capability and operator qualification are both constraints. Work does not land on a machinist who is not signed off on it.
It protects the rest
Everything else resequences around the insertion, and anything that cannot absorb it is flagged before you promise the date, not after.
The part nobody else sells
Scheduling to a qualified person, not just an open machine.
Every scheduler in this market treats labour as hours and shift availability — a timeclock and a capacity row. None of them treat competence as a constraint.
In a fifteen-person shop that is the constraint that actually binds. The machine is free. The man who can run that process is not. A schedule that does not know the difference will hand you a plan the floor quietly ignores, and by Thursday you are back on the whiteboard.
Si-Scheduling holds who is signed off on what — processes, machines, inspection, certifications — and will not place work on somebody who is not.
The loop
The schedule is also where the lead time on your quote comes from.
A price without a date is half a quote, and “four to six weeks” is not a date. It is a habit.
Si-Q asks the schedule what the shop can actually take, and the quote goes out with a delivery date derived from the load that exists today — alongside a price derived from what work like this actually took. When the customer accepts, that job takes the slot it was quoted against, and the load changes for the next quote.
Price and date, both from the floor, both on the same document. A shop that can promise a real date wins work from shops that cannot.
The honest part
You still overrule it.
An automatic schedule that cannot be argued with is a schedule the floor stops believing.
Drag a job where you want it. The system resequences around your decision and tells you what it costs — which jobs moved, which dates are now at risk, and what it does to margin. You keep the judgement. It does the arithmetic.
Straight answers
Questions people ask about Si-Scheduling.
What is automated production scheduling in a job shop?
The system reads the routings on every open job, the capability and load of every machine, the shifts and qualifications of the people, and sequences the work so the promised dates hold. It re-runs whenever something changes rather than once a week.
What happens when a rush job comes in?
It is inserted where it genuinely fits and everything else resequences around it. Any job that cannot absorb the insertion is flagged before you commit to the date, so the conversation with the customer happens in advance rather than afterwards.
Can it schedule to specific operators rather than just machines?
Yes. Operator qualification is a scheduling constraint, not a note. The system holds who is signed off on which processes, machines and inspection steps, and does not place work on someone who is not.
Can I still move jobs by hand?
Yes, by dragging. The schedule resequences around your decision and shows you what the change did to the other promised dates and to margin.
Does the schedule set the lead time we quote?
Yes. The quote carries a delivery date derived from the real load rather than a standard lead time, and the price beside it comes from what that work actually took on your floor.
How is this different from a whiteboard?
The whiteboard is a good interface and a bad calculator. This keeps the first and replaces the second, so the plan survives the second change of the morning.
Bring us a week that went wrong.
Thirty minutes on a shop set up like yours. Tell us about a rush job that broke the schedule and we will run that one.