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Solving DAM Problems: What's the DAM Problem with Scheduling?

My good friend, retired U.S. Army Colonel Carl Schott, was once the commander in charge of the units that would have deployed tactical nuclear weapons if Russian tanks had ventured into West Germany. He once told me, “The very best plan never survives the first bullet.” Part of his background was flying helicopters in Vietnam where, in one type of mission, he flew at night to draw North Vietnamese fire so that the gunships above him could identify the enemy and kill them.

Just like you, Carl had to deal with immediate reality. Rarely did anything go according to plan. Just as with the fog of war, in the fog of production, trying to figure out what is happening with the customer orders can be, at best, frustrating. We often find our master schedule is hardly that! It can cause any one of us to say, “What is the DAM problem with scheduling?”

Before I answer this question, I want to go off on one of my tangents. Recently, I was having morning coffee with Carl at Starbucks. He told me the German commanders told him that in World War II, they were extremely frustrated with the American infantry. For example, it was almost impossible to force the Americans into a defensive position and keep them there. The Americans were always improvising and deviating from the plan. The Germans couldn’t predict how the Americans would respond in a given battle. If the Germans tried to deviate from their master plan, which often came from Hitler, they could get shot. The battle for Stalingrad exemplified the German war machine’s rigidity to the plan and its inability to improvise.

What does this have to do with our master schedule and how we dispatch jobs in the shop? Production enterprise-level intelligent software systems, which tell us how material is to move on the factory floor, can create a rigidity that has the potential to sink us. I like to refer to these systems as HAL, the master computer system that controlled everything on the mothership in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” We are not to question HAL; we are simply to follow his orders: HAL, open the pod bay doors.

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Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the July 2013 issue of The PCB Magazine.