Operations Management

SUMMARY: Organizations schedule their activities in order to meet customers’ requirements on time and improve their operational efficiency. Scheduling of activities is important for both manufacturing and service firms. An operation can be scheduled in different ways. But they can be broadly divided into forward scheduling, backward scheduling and a combination of both.

Routing, loading, and dispatching are the important activities in the scheduling of an operation. Routing describes the sequence of operations and the work centers that perform the work. Loading assigns jobs to various work centers. Dispatching is the release of an order to start the production operation. The different priority rules in dispatching are: earliest due date, longest processing time, shortest processing time, first in first serve, and slack time remaining.