Turning a revised OEM schedule into a plan for a Pantnagar supplier

The schedule arrives as a PDF on email, a download from the OEM portal, or a forwarded WhatsApp image. Someone copies the quantities onto the whiteboard. That is where the first error creeps in. It rarely gets caught.

Log the revision instead. Note the part number, the drawing revision, the daily or weekly quantity, the date it was received and the revision number from the OEM. Keep the old line visible beside the new one. Never overwrite. A revision history lets you prove to the OEM planner, months later, exactly which quantity you were asked to build on which date and what you committed in reply.

Then see what moved. A pull-in of three days matters far more than a change in the month total. Mark each line as pulled in, pushed out, increased, reduced or cancelled. A supervisor reading the sheet at six in the morning should see the movement without comparing two PDFs by eye.

Explode each part into its bill of materials. A bracket needs coil of one gauge, a casting needs aluminium ingot, a harness needs wire in three colours and a crimp terminal. Multiply by the revised quantity.

Compare against stores stock, open purchase orders and the supplier’s promised dates. Short lines are easy to see once the numbers sit side by side. Nobody has to hunt through three files. Good. Add the stores keeper’s remarks on bin stock that is booked against another part, since that quantity is not really free to use.

Flag the items where lead time is longer than the pull-in. Those need a phone call today. Not a note next week.

Capacity is not a monthly figure. Shifts differ. A press line runs differently on a night shift with two operators than on a day shift with four. Use the cycle time per part, the die change time and the planned maintenance slots. Include the trial runs for new dies, which quietly eat a night shift on a mechanical press line every few weeks.

Work backwards from the OEM dispatch date. Allow time for inspection, painting or plating at an outside vendor, packing in the returnable bins and the truck run to the plant gate.

When a machine is overloaded, you have only a few honest options. Add a shift, move the job to another machine with a different die, outsource a process, or tell the OEM planner early which quantity you can hold. The last option feels uncomfortable but costs far less than a missed dispatch and a line stoppage at the customer’s plant.

If the OEM wants one thousand good pieces, you cannot plan one thousand. Scrap is real. Each part has its own history of weld porosity, burrs, short shots or dimensional drift. The production log holds it if operators record the defect code honestly. Each part has its own history of scrap, rework and line returns. Pull that history from the production log by part and by machine.

Plan the gross quantity, so that good pieces come out at the right number. A part with a tricky weld or a thin wall needs a larger allowance than a flat blank.

Review the allowance monthly. Compare planned scrap against actual scrap from the rejection sheet. Adjust. If the rejection sheet shows a die wearing out, the plan should quietly carry that cost until the die is repaired.

The output is one dated plan. It lists part, quantity, machine, shift, material status, dispatch slot. Stores see what to issue. The supervisor sees what to run. Dispatch sees which invoice and gate pass are due.

Keep the plan in a shared system with a change history, so a supervisor can see why Tuesday’s job moved. A whiteboard photo cannot. Test it. Excel can, but only if one person owns the file.

Start next week with one part family. Run the revised schedule through all four steps by hand, note where it slows down, and decide what a shared tool must do for you.