The master production schedule, or more usually called these days the master schedule or simply MPS, is the means by which the company’s approved Business Plans
and objectives, often expressed by a sales and operations plan (output of S&OP process), are converted into factory and vendor schedules in order to manage customer demand in the best way to optimize customer service.

Master scheduling is essentially a manually controlled function, at least in the short to medium term. This manual control must extend just beyond the point where our ability to respond starts to become constrained, often this point is the cumulative lead time sometimes called the firm time fence.

Typical problems with MPS are missed delivery dates, “hot lists”, mismatched stock, excessive work in progress, under-used resources one week and overtime soon after. There is also often a high level of instability that results in large numbers of action or exception messages from the planning system to the master schedulers and vendors.

The most important for manufacturing is to be responsive to customers and simultaneously achieve stability in the factory, making promises to customers and keeping them every time, managing and controlling change regardless of its source.

Real results typically come less from the complicated aspects of the system and more from:

  • Doing the fundamentals extremely well
  • Getting the users of the new tools to accept ownership and accountability for results.

Many companies implement new “advanced” systems to improve their planning capabilities only to realize that, after the switch, they are typically no better off. That is because they didn’t address the fundamentals and the people issues first.

  • This course is for people who are concerned with the operation or design of the master schedule and Integrated Business Planning process. This includes people from the functions of materials, engineering, finance, master scheduling, manufacturing, sales, marketing, and customer service. Team attendance early in the process is encouraged.
  • Operations, Supply Chain, Materials Management, Logistics, Demand Planning and Sales Forecasting, Supply Chain and Market Analysts practitioners and management.

Training approach:

Lecture Discussion
Group Activity Hands-on Laptop

Target group:

  • Senior managers, directors,
  • VPs of:
    • Supply Chain, Operations, Manufacturing, Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Finance, Sales and Operations Planning Leads.