The information involved here includes things like work center identification,demonstrated capacity, efficiency (or productivity) factors,and desired queues for the job shops.Review the work center arrangement now being used. Ask whether the machines are grouped correctly into work centers and whether the operator skill groups are established properly. A key factor here—how does each foreman view the equipment and people in his or her department, in terms of elements to be scheduled and loaded?
Make whatever changes are necessary. The goal is to enable CRP, input/output, and shop dispatching to give the foreman the right information as to work load, priorities, and schedule performance. Realize that changes in work center identification will mean changes to the routings. A good bit of work may be involved. A computer program can often help in revising routings to reflect new work center assignments.Start to gather statistics for each work center: demonstrated capacity, efficiency factors, and planned queue. This last element may represent a dramatic change. For most companies, planned queues will be smaller than they were under the informal system. Many companies determine their queues by considering “the range” and “the pain.” Range refers to the variability of job arrival at the work centers; pain means how much it will hurt if the queue for a particular work center disappears, and it runs out of work.
The key players in these decisions are the foremen and the industrial engineers. Usually, the engineers develop the numbers, while the foremen are more involved with the qualitative information, such as grouping equipment for the best work center arrangement, the amount of pain suffered by the center that runs out of work, and so on. Foremen buy-in is critical here. Therefore, they, and their bosses, must call the shots. They, and their people, are the ones who’ll be accountable for making it work.