Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Resource Planning and Scheduling
Production inventory planning and production run scheduling is always a challenging and
imprecise process, no matter how large and sophisticated your operation. A seemingly in-
finitenumberofvariablescanaffectyourscheduling,albeitdifferentoperationsinverydif-
ferent ways. If a company has only one product that needs to be built, stocked, and suppor-
ted,thewayitgoesaboutplanningthelogisticsforthatsinglemodelwillbevastlydifferent
from the systems of another company that manufactures a larger mix of products. For ex-
ample, a production run of iPhones built at the Foxconn factory will look far different from
the day-to-day feel of the SparkFun production floor, where hundreds of unique designs are
manufactured, but in far smaller volumes.
To be successful in setting up your own manufacturing process, the more you know
about what your demand is or will be for your product(s), the better you will be able to
scale your resources to most effectively meet that demand. From that estimation, it is pos-
sible to set up your assembly operations and equip each step of the process with the re-
sources needed to give you the overall production capacity that you will need. It will also
be important to determine how long each step of the process will take, given the tools
available at each step. This information will help you identify where the bottlenecks in
your production system are expected to occur. Bottlenecks are inevitable and can be used
to your advantage to improve the timing of your production scheduling.
Most likely, you will already have your production “line” set up before you know how
well it is sized relative to your demand. That is okay. The production process is always in
a state of flux—specifically, in a constant state of improvement. Many lessons will be
learned as you build more. Your operation will naturally find efficiency gains as new ideas
are considered for how to improve the bottlenecks in the system.
When preparing for the production run of the MaKey MaKey boards and kits—the
largest single production run in SparkFun's history—it was recognized early on that
SparkFun's production capacity was not great enough to be able to take on the additional
13,000-plus MaKey MaKey kits while also keeping the rest of the more than 450 in-house
built circuit boards and kits in stock. To meet the goal of shipping out all MaKey MaKey
kits by the August deadline, a primary decision would have to be made, though a relat-
ively simple one: find a way to increase production capacity or strategically decide to dis-
regard a segment of SparkFun's standard catalog offerings so that more focus could be
given to the MaKey MaKey boards and kits. This decision painfully brought to light how
difficult it can be to add more capacity when needed. Ultimately, it was decided to cut
back on fulfilling the demand for a number of the lower-volume and lower-priority
designs until the MaKey MaKey units had been shipped to every supporter of the MaKey
MaKey Kickstarter campaign.
