Definition
Schedule drift is the gradual divergence between a published production schedule and what the floor is actually doing, caused by every uncaptured floor event since the schedule was generated. Drift starts small — a setup running long, a material slip — and compounds across the shift, until the published plan is a memory rather than an instruction.
Why it matters
Drift is invisible to the scheduling system itself. The plan still looks correct in the ERP. But by mid-shift, the actual run sequence on most work centers no longer matches the published list. Operators improvise, planners chase status, and the gap between official plan and executed plan widens until end of shift.
Common failure mode
The 6 a.m. plan looks clean. By 11 a.m., three operations have slipped, one machine is down, a hot job was inserted verbally, and material for two upstream jobs has not arrived. The supervisor has manually rerouted half a dozen jobs. The official schedule is intact and meaningless.
How Skody approaches it
Skody treats drift as the normal operating state and replans continuously to keep the published schedule and the real floor aligned. Each replan absorbs a slice of drift before it propagates.
Related terms
Questions
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