Operations Management: Sustainability and Supply Chain Management, Twelfth Edition

Summary

Scheduling involves the timing of operations to achieve the efficient movement of units through a system. This chapter addressed the issues of short-term scheduling in process-focused and service environments. We saw that process-focused facilities are production systems in which products are made to order and that scheduling tasks in them can become complex. Several aspects and approaches to scheduling, loading, and sequencing of jobs were introduced. These ranged from Gantt charts and the assignment method of scheduling to a series of priority rules, the critical-ratio rule, Johnson’s rule for sequencing, and finite capacity scheduling.

Service systems generally differ from manufacturing systems. This leads to the use of first-come, ...