hello I’m Gary Shotton and i’m setting here in my machine shop we’re faced with demands by our customers some of our customers give us last-minute demands some of our customers give us parts that we have long-term projections to know what’s coming up next and what they want we work towards having very close partnership with our customers so we pride ourselves in being able to respond to their every need in this video I’m going to talk about how we do some of those scheduling how I’ve done scheduling myself in a previous business and hopefully give you a few tips on things you might do to work with scheduling yourself now I say scheduling in a business I now carry with me a smartphone and I have a calendar and you know i’m constantly able to reschedule myself with a push of the button because i am using my device very efficiently and I’ll put something on mice personal schedule and with one phone call it will change and I can move that around and i miss very very few appointments sometimes I need to communicate when I have a conflict but I don’t miss very many appointments and right away I’m not very very very seldom I late to an appointment because I think that’s important now for about 17 years i own a trucking company and in specific it was a company where we move furniture and that meant we had trucks with drivers but it wasn’t a driving job as much as for the workers it was stopping at the front of a house in the United States and we would go through and load every single thing in that house into the truck expecting it not to be broken expecting it to arrive to the new house and being unloaded that house without damage and on a reasonable budget and a reasonable time frame I’m telling it was pretty difficult and one of those things that we had to do is schedule because a lot of our customers didn’t want to move when we wanted to the move they wanted to move at the end of the month because that’s when their rent or their payment was up so we had a whole surge of people that wanted to move the last 45 days of the month but in the middle of the month uh we didn’t work so busy so we try to balance that off when we could but when it came down to it I had to decide many mice times myself I have helpers to decide can we take on more jobs if we can we take on more jobs based on the schedule can we be sure that would be able to take care of our customers if we took too many jobs then somebody’s going to get shorted so i had to communicate and I did communicate with our lead people the people on each truck because there are away from my office away from my home base I said you’ve got to communicate with me you just have to so one of the keys would be communications am I getting clean clear communications from everyone that’s involved with the scheduling process that’s everyone’s responsibility so here’s what could happen without communications occasionally it did and I would pretty well have a pretty stiff talk with somebody because we would need to know if we sent out a crew that we’re expecting this job to be a full household going to take 10 hours it’s gonna be a whole day and if I haven’t heard from my crew then I’m expecting that that went on fine i couldn’t have this and it happened a few times into the day six o’clock in the evening our driver comes in and as he walks in this all by the way we need to be out there again tomorrow because they have much more for us to do we’re going to have to be there another full day and I go no you can’t do that to me you new at noon you new at ten o’clock you knew way before driving all the way back there and telling me that you’re going to have another day on that job because I don’t have the manpower this truck is going to the the other customer or the opposite could be true I’m pulling out my hair trying to rearrange jobs get people in town relocated cover jobs and the driver and team that we had out that we thought was going to be out all day would come in a little before noon like four hours I into a 10 our job and say you know job went well they moved everything we’re done now no you got to tell me you got to tell me because I’m trying to schedule let’s apply it to our machine shop okay we’re working hard at getting scheduling it’s not just the plant managers responsibility it’s everyone in our company’s responsibility first of all we have a time allotted for a job if we’re not able to meet that time we’re working towards making sure that every one of our machinist knows it’s important to try to make that time because of scheduling and other things profitability but also because we have another job behind that and we don’t know how a schedule adjust so we’re just into it we hope that’s going to work out but we’re having our machinist email us to tell us if they’re behind schedule because we’re planning that machine for the next job we they don’t know it but we might have a a a hot job and expedited job come in that we must get on the machine there’s only one mission one part can run on that machine at one time so we want to finish the job before we do to the next job it’s all dependent upon communication the other keyword would be flexibility yeah we need communications but even with good communications i’ve got to have some kind of of latitude or flexibility equipped give a quick example I was with him flying about three months ago two months ago and I was boarded my airplane in one hub city and it was a pretty tight connection is that we got off we saw everybody exit and then we hear the on appreciated or on wanted announcement I’m sorry folks that the trip lane that we planned you to load onto is now called out of service or something mechanically wrong with it well none of us want to get on the plane airplane that’s going to crash something mechanically wrong so we are glad they caught it but we’re thinking oh my goodness were going to be a long time waiting know this company had scheduling in mind they then announced that they would have another airplane at that port at that at that gate in 15 minutes they’ll pole though the one airplane away with a tug and then pull up the another air . they are thinking schedule follow me well that didn’t actually happen it must have worked better because about five minutes later they said we’ve changed our plans if you move to gates down to the other gate we already have a plane there in you can start boarding boarding boarding the plane now by the time we got on the plane we were the we actually made up almost all of the time even though the plane we’re gonna board was a malfunction wow I’m interested in flying with that airline because they’ve got scheduling down paths were working on scheduling you’re going to add many people after working on scheduling if you’re in the restaurant business and you’ve got to have your your meals all out to the customer at a given time that Cook has to schedule what he’s gonna cook first to make sure they all no one wants to be at the table and somebody gets one meal and they’re totally finished eating finished eating and the next plate comes for the the other part of the but we’ll out what kind of a honeymoon was that what kind of a a date out with your girlfriend if you eat all your food first get totally done wiping off your face and then your wife or girlfriend their plate sets down that’s a scheduling issue we face them all of us face it if you want to rise to the top if you want to be the best company that you possibly could be if you want good sales repeat customers you will deal with scheduling unless you just have some kind of business that doesn’t matter at all and you’re making tons of pride ahead of time and your wasteful that’s what i would call it scheduling is going to be important the two keywords communications is vital and flexibility a back-up plan I hope you’ve enjoyed this I would ask that you would consider sharing this when someone else if it’s valuable to you and then give us feedback give us comments let us know how we can improve this we’re trying to present teachings that are acceptable and true on a global nation of nature and globally true with multi cultures and multi-languages thank you very much