Many people have a big misconception about office jobs, always thinking that sitting in an office just means filling out orders and handling documents, as if anyone who can use a computer can do it. Especially those of us in production control are often told, “Isn’t it just scheduling orders and printing out work orders?” Every time I hear something like that, I really want to say that if it were truly just entering data and pressing a print button, production control probably wouldn’t be so easily overwhelmed every day.
Issuing work orders can be very simple if you put it that way, but it can also be complicated enough to make you roll your eyes. Today we received an order, and instead of just looking at the quantity and delivery date and opening the order right away, we first have to check the BOM table, related processes, and component part numbers, see if there’s enough inventory, which materials need to be purchased and when they can arrive, then decide whether to open this order at all, how much to produce, whether other orders can be scheduled together, and even check the current production status on the line. Some sites prefer to complete the same item in one go without constant changeovers, but if the delivery dates of two orders are too far apart and other urgent orders are in between, we can’t simply follow the site’s preferred method. We have to coordinate how much quantity to complete before switching lines and come back later to make up the rest. These are the things production control calculates every day.
Moreover, orders aren’t set in stone once scheduled. Sometimes materials are delayed, production issues arise, or the client temporarily can’t accept delivery, causing an originally urgent order to suddenly become less urgent. At that point, we readjust, moving items that have materials and can be produced to the front to avoid leaving the line idle. Yet sometimes the site only sees the result and thinks, “Why are you doing this non-urgent item first while that one everyone keeps pushing is still waiting?” What they don’t see is that if we don’t clear the available materials today, the whole line just sits waiting, and when the truly urgent item can finally be made, everything piles up in front, and in the end it’s still production control that has to clean it up.
Not to mention some orders can’t be finished in a single day; they may need to be split across multiple days, with partial warehousing. In between there can be material shortages, replenishments, insufficient quantities, rework due to abnormalities, and so on. Every day, production control recalculates “where we are now, how much is left, when it can be completed, and whether the next materials will arrive on time.” Sometimes it looks like just a number, but behind it lies an entire chain of production arrangements.
So I’m increasingly convinced that many jobs are truly “not in the position, not in the know.” Without actually sitting in that seat, it’s hard to understand how much thinking goes on behind what looks like a simple “order-filling” action. Production control isn’t just turning orders into work orders; it’s about keeping orders, materials, inventory, production lines, delivery dates, and the status of all departments in your head at once and figuring out how to fit everything into limited capacity.
That’s also why when I hear people say office jobs are easier—just sitting in an air-conditioned office—I can only smile. Some jobs are hard to truly understand without having done them yourself. Every position has its own difficulties; it’s just that when those things don’t happen to you, it’s easy to see only the surface layer.