How to Improve On-Time Delivery in Manufacturing: Fix the Schedule First

On-time delivery (OTD) is the share of orders, or order lines, shipped on or before the date you promised. It sounds simple, but three choices change the number:

• Which date counts. The customer's requested date and your promised date are often different. Be clear which one you report.
• Lines or orders. An order with ten lines and one late line is late for the customer.
• Re-promised dates. If a date is moved after it's already at risk and the new date is counted as the target, OTD looks better than the customer's experience.

Measure it the same way every week, and track the trend. See also due-date performance.

• Dates are set against infinite capacity. Most ERP and MRP scheduling assumes every work center can take whatever is loaded. Ten jobs promised through the same machine in the same week look fine on paper.
• The plan goes stale. A machine goes down, material is late, a hot job lands. A plan built once a week or once a morning is wrong by lunch, and the floor stops trusting it.
• People aren't in the model. The machine is free, but nobody qualified to run it is on shift.
• Local priorities win. Each area keeps its own machines busy or chases the loudest hot job, and the bottleneck starves.
• Nobody sees the bottleneck until orders are late. Reports that lag by days show the problem after customers do.

1. Schedule to finite capacity. Place each operation only where the machine is available and, if people are your constraint, where a qualified person is on shift (Skody's Plant & Enterprise plan). See finite capacity scheduling.
2. Promise dates from the schedule, not a lead-time table. Before committing to a date, run a capable to promise (CTP) check: add the new order as a what-if, even before it's in the ERP, and see what it does to everything else.
3. Recompute when the floor changes, not once a week. A plan that follows the floor stays believable, and a believable plan is one people follow.
4. Protect the bottleneck. Find the constrained work center, keep it fed, and group setups there with setup families so capacity isn't lost to changeovers.
5. Make late jobs visible early. A late-job view and a capacity forecast, on the same plan the floor sees, turn "we missed it" into "we'll miss it unless we add a shift on Thursday."

Skody does those five things on top of your ERP. It connects to ProShop, Fulcrum and JobBOSS² (Acumatica and SYSPRO integrations are also listed on skody.ai), schedules finite machine capacity (operator skills and workforce scheduling are available on the Plant & Enterprise plan), recomputes the whole shop when conditions change, and puts the result on dashboards: Gantt, bottleneck map, late-job visibility and capacity forecast.

Published customers:

• Three Sigma Manufacturing in Kent, Washington extended its planning horizon from one week to one year, and the planner accepts the computed baseline about 99% of days.
• Yeager Manufacturing in Winter Park, Florida uses what-if scenarios on live ERP data to test changes before they become late jobs.
• Zimmer Manufacturing in Leander, Texas runs Skody dashboards on shop-floor monitors and keeps ProShop as its ERP.

Be honest about the cause before you buy anything, including Skody.

• The shop is booked beyond its capacity. A finite schedule will show the overload clearly, but it can't create hours. The fix is capacity, outsourcing or different promises.
• Late material is the main cause. If most late orders wait on suppliers, purchasing and supplier management matter more than sequencing.
• Quality and scrap. Remakes consume the capacity the schedule counted on.
• Routing data is badly wrong. If run and setup times in the ERP are far from reality, fix the data first; any scheduler depends on it.
• Your ERP's scheduling is already enough. JobBOSS², for example, includes a Scheduling Advisor that flags jobs that are behind. If your plan holds through the day, use what you have.
• You want a one-time license. User Solutions sells EDGEBIC, an installed finite-capacity scheduler, at $25,000 or $35,000 as a one-time license.

• Shop plan: starts at $1,500 per month, month-to-month. Includes machine capacity scheduling, finite-capacity scheduling, automatic conflict resolution, due-date-first optimization, ERP integration, delivery-risk and late-job visibility, planner overrides and what-if scenarios, and production dashboards.
• Plant & Enterprise plan: custom pricing based on scope. Adds workforce capacity scheduling, skills and personnel availability constraints, machine and workforce optimization, pallet pool and multi-part scheduling, lights-out production planning, MES and machine telemetry integration, multi-department and multi-site deployment, and advanced integrations.
• Pricing is per shop, not per user. There is no free trial; Shop plans are month-to-month instead.
• Every deployment is hosted in ITAR-ready Gov Cloud. SOC 2 Type II.

See pricing.