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Production scheduling holds the key to product availability and freshness.
Let’s consider the entire finished goods distribution network as a system and apply Little’s Law. If we want to control total inventory in the system and improve the flow of products, we should have an active control over the system input, which is the production schedule. We should add fresh inventory only when some inventory moves out of the system, else the system lead time would go up, thereby resulting in loss of freshness.
To sum up, finished goods addition to the system should be determined by what is going out, which is consumer offtake.
If the consumers are buying more quantities of a product, we should add more of that product to the system. The better we can synchronize it and minimize the latency in response, the better the system would perform in terms of product availability and freshness.
Dynamic synchronization of supply with demand is the key concept in Demand Driven Supply Chains and can be achieved only if we make the production scheduling more flexible and responsive.