How a high-mix precision manufacturer uses live what-if scenarios to test labor, capacity and material changes before they become delivery problems.
Machines + People
Scheduled together
Minutes
To validate a changed plan
Real-Time
What-if scenarios
Weeks Ahead
See bottlenecks before they hit delivery
About Yeager
It was knowing what to change.
Yeager Manufacturing already had ProShop as its ERP. The challenge was turning the data in the system into a production plan that could survive what actually happens on the floor.
A machine can be available while the right operator is not.
Material can move.
An employee can call out.
A hot order can arrive.
And a resource that looks overloaded is not necessarily the resource actually preventing a job from shipping on time.
Yeager needed more than another static schedule. The team wanted to know:
We wanted something we could confidently send to our shop floor.
Zach Yeager
President, Yeager Manufacturing
The Story
Now in scheduling we run numerous scenarios in real time. We look at the dashboards Skody provides to see how we might solve the bottleneck. The real power is that in real time, we create a plan with the bottleneck fixed.
For instance if we feel like if we had one more person running one of the mills we would be cruising… so we add Mill skills to a random person — usually an office employee just to test — and run a new schedule. Did our delivery date actually improve?
If yes, wonderful but if no then we look at where the bottleneck is now and go solve that one. If we brought this material in sooner, would that help? And so on…
What-If Scenarios
01
Yeager can temporarily change labor skills or availability and recompute the plan.
The question is not whether another person creates more theoretical capacity.
It is:
Which customer delivery dates actually improve?
If the dates do not materially change, labor in that area was not the constraint that mattered.
02
An open machine does not help if the required material is not ready when the operation needs to run.
Skody lets the team change material readiness and recalculate the plan.
The result shows whether earlier material actually improves completion dates or simply exposes the next constraint.
03
"If we have absenteeism, we plug it in and calculate/validate a new plan in a couple minutes."
Skody removes unavailable labor capacity, recalculates the affected operations across the remaining machines and qualified people, and gives the team a revised plan to validate.
04
The same planning logic can be applied before committing to new work.
Keep today's plan as the baseline.
Add the proposed order in a separate scenario.
Recompute.
Then compare what happens to existing customer delivery dates.
The question becomes:
Can we take this order without quietly making another customer's job late?
Example Skody plan-comparison workflow. Jobs, customers and percentages shown are sample data, not Yeager production data.
Constraints
The obvious bottleneck is not always the constraint that matters to delivery.
Yeager can test a proposed fix before acting.
Add a person. Recompute.
Move material earlier. Recompute.
Change available capacity. Recompute.
If the customer delivery dates improve, the team has evidence that the change matters.
If they do not, the next constraint becomes visible.
That changes the conversation from:
"The shop feels overloaded."
to:
"This specific resource, during this specific period, is what prevents these jobs from shipping."
Scheduling Meetings
Sometimes scheduling goes great, and meetings are quick. Sometimes our backlog is nuts and we might run 8–10 of these scenarios in the hour long scheduling session.
However, we come out of it with solid evidence that adding a resource in a specific area on a certain date would improve our OTD.
The point of the meeting is no longer manually constructing another schedule.
The team can spend the time deciding:
Skody computes the schedule.
The team decides what to do about it.
Before and After
Machines + People
What really stands out is how it accounts for both machines and people — not just a static schedule, but a worker-driven plan our team actually follows.
A machine being open does not mean an operation can run.
The qualified operator must also be:
Skody schedules those constraints together.
ERP
Yeager did not replace ProShop to solve production scheduling.
ProShop remains the ERP and system of record.
Skody connects to the production data and handles the finite scheduling and decision layer across:
ProShop holds the work.
Skody helps decide how that work gets executed.
Running ProShop? See how Skody works with ProShop scheduling.Operational Change
Traditional expediting focuses attention on the jobs closest to becoming late.
Finite forward scheduling lets the team look farther ahead.
Instead of asking:
"What do we need to expedite this week?"
the team can ask:
"What constraint five or six weeks from now is going to make us late?"
That moves management attention upstream — while there is still time to change labor, materials, priorities or capacity.
Operational Changes
See what is actually limiting delivery rather than infer it from historical utilization.
Schedule qualified people and machines together.
Test additional labor, capacity, material timing or priority changes before acting.
Change employee availability and validate a revised plan in minutes.
See delivery risk weeks before the affected orders reach shipment.
Give the floor a plan based on current production conditions.
"Our experience with Skody has been liberating."
— Zach Yeager, President, Yeager Manufacturing
Why It Matters
A useful production scheduling system needs to understand:
But Yeager demonstrates the more important point:
Once the production model is live, you can ask it questions.
Compute. Compare. Decide.
FAQ
See what happens before you move people, add overtime, expedite material or promise another order.