A manufacturer's complicated reality of scheduling, measuring performance

Manufacturing is complicated. I’ve said that before, but it bears repeating. Aside from quality, supply chain, personnel, compliance, and hosts of other complexities, scheduling alone is complicated in the “almost impossible to get right” kind of way. Scheduling is a problem that a computer scientist would call “np-hard,” which literally means “non-deterministic polynomial-time hard.” That’s a mouthful, but more colloquially it means a computer could spend the age of the universe trying possibilities and not finish.

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