When I used to work at a steel factory, the company had five trucks, ranging from 3.5-ton small trucks to 17-ton large ones. Every day all five trucks were dispatched, but they still couldn't always finish delivering to all the customers scheduled for that day. So when scheduling the trucks back then, I still had some sense of weight—knowing roughly how many kilograms or tons each batch of goods weighed, whether they could be loaded together, or whether trips needed to be split.
However, most of the items I handled before were relatively simple plates and bent parts. Although there were some more complex items, I could at least estimate the weight from size and quantity. For finished products where many parts were welded together, it was harder to judge—this really required some experience; you couldn't just calculate it on a computer and know the answer.
But now at this company, many of the items I handle are these “welded-into-a-big-lump” finished products. Sometimes when I look at them, I can't help but wonder, how heavy are they really?
The first time I encountered this situation, I naively thought that since these items were all ready, we could just send them together to the vendor for processing. The purchasing department directly told me, “That’s way too heavy; the truck can’t fit it.”
I was genuinely stunned at that moment, because only then did I realize our company only had one 6-ton wing truck, and after subtracting the truck’s own weight, the actual payload was just a little over one ton.
Over a ton might seem like a lot to many people, but the processes I’m responsible for mostly require outsourcing, then sending the items back to the factory for the next process. So once something is finished, it’s not just left there—we have to figure out how to send it out, estimate when processing will be done and when it will return, whether it can connect to the next production stage upon return, and ultimately whether it can meet the shipping deadline.
The most troublesome part is that sometimes everything is already finished, but because it can’t all be sent at once, it has to be split into two or three trips. When the deadline is tight, I start frantically scheduling truck trips.
Then purchasing starts complaining, “If you schedule so many trucks, no one else’s trips can be scheduled afterward.”
I also end up arguing a bit with purchasing, because from my perspective, I’m not deliberately trying to hog the trucks—I’m just looking at the BOM and knowing these items need to be outsourced. If they aren’t sent out, the next steps can’t proceed, we won’t know when they’ll come back, and that affects later scheduling and shipping dates.
Am I supposed to wait until the items pile up in the factory, outsourcing has no trucks available, and the deadline is approaching before saying, “Oh no, what do we do?” So many times I have no choice but to grab the truck slots first and schedule them, at least securing that time point. If things really change later, I can adjust then.
This has also made me gradually realize that production control scheduling isn’t just looking at the dates on work orders and saying “do this today, do that tomorrow.” Whether a product gets produced, when it gets produced, where it needs to be sent after completion, what method to use for transport, how much to send at once, when it can return, and which process it connects to upon return—all of these are interconnected.
Especially now that many of the items I handle go through outsourcing, truck trips themselves have become part of the production schedule. Without a truck, it can’t be sent out; if it can’t be sent out, it can’t be processed; without processing, it can’t return to the factory; without returning, the subsequent processes can only wait.
So sometimes when purchasing and I argue over truck slots, it’s not really about who’s more reasonable—everyone’s tasks are just tangled together. Purchasing has to manage truck slots for the whole company, while I only want to ensure the work orders I’m responsible for can proceed smoothly. The two sides simply see different things.
But for me, since the BOM already indicates that this product requires outsourcing, I can’t pretend not to see it. Once something is ready, it has to be sent out. If there aren’t enough truck slots, I have to find ways to split the loads and schedule them, at least protecting the parts that will affect later production.
Back at the steel factory, I thought I already had a good grasp of truck trips and weight. Only now do I realize that switching industries can turn even “how to get things sent out” into a whole new field of study.
All I can say is that production control really requires knowing a bit of everything. You don’t have to master every detail professionally, but at least understand how it affects your own schedule. Otherwise, many things that seem on the surface like “just call a truck to send it out” actually involve far more complexity behind the scenes than you’d imagine.