TABLE OF CONTENTS Clues, their acquisition and interpretation, are important for decision making.
It takes time to build the historical base for interpretation and under- standing of the clues.
The initial focus of production control is on what did not happen as expected or what can be expected not to occur as previously planned.
Production control is an iterative process where partial problems are solved with partial information. Not everything is known at the same time and not all of the problem has to be solved at the same time.
Important, tightly constrained or restricted decisions are made first, decomposing the problem; the remainder of the schedule flows around these anchored decisions.
In Chapters 3 and 4, the objectives, roles, and functions of planners and schedulers were discussed. In this chapter, the focus shifts a bit and looks at part of the work day, the part of the day when planning and scheduling is done. Hopefully there are methods and policies for the actual task of planning and it does not sound like:
but the spirit of things is usually impulsive rather than methodical. Get the thing done, is the order and the procedure becomes one of a rush, hustle, tear-things-to-pieces kind, in a mad effort to obey orders, regardless of whether or not these orders could have been obeyed to better advantage some other way.
Knoeppel made this observation in 1911. He could have been describing Jake s situation and how Jake did his job. Instead...
