On a recent customer engagement the project team experienced issues getting acceptance from manufacturing teams for the proposed new planning processes. The reason: “The plan should be done in the factory”; “we have full visibility of current inventories, orders, production output” and so on. This however was primarily a language issue: Are we talking planning or scheduling? Once we explained the difference both teams calmed and agreement was reached. So, what’s the difference, you ask?

One way to differentiate is looking at an example. The daughter of a friend in Europe and her friend graduated from high school and were planning a multi-month USA road trip. She did her planning extensively: Continue reading →