Lead Production Scheduler

Position Summary

The Production Scheduler is responsible for developing and executing a comprehensive production planning strategy that balances customer demand, manufacturing capacity, materials availability, and workforce resources. This role serves as the organization's subject matter expert for production planning and scheduling processes. This position partners with Production, Supply Chain, Engineering, Customer Service, and Sales to establish finite-capacity scheduling processes, workload balancing across work centers, and data-driven production execution practices. The role will mentor planners, supervisors, and production teams while providing leadership in continuous improvement initiatives.

responsibilities

• Serve as the business process owner for production planning and scheduling functions within the ERP system.
• Develop and maintain finite-capacity production schedules that consider labor, equipment, tooling, and material constraints.
• Establish production planning methodologies that align demand with available manufacturing resources.
• Analyze work center loading and capacity utilization to identify bottlenecks and improve throughput.
• Lead Operations Planning and production planning activities to ensure realistic commitments to customers.
• Drive workload leveling and resource balancing across manufacturing departments.
• Develop planning metrics and dashboards to measure capacity utilization, throughput, schedule adherence, and on-time delivery performance.
• Create long-term and short-term production plans based on forecast demand and operational capacity.
• Lead implementation and optimization of ERP planning and scheduling capabilities.
• Partner with ERP project teams to design, test, and deploy production planning functionality.
• Develop system workflows, scheduling rules, capacity models, and planning parameters.
• Ensure routing, work center, labor standards, and capacity data are maintained accurately to support planning processes.
• Train users and champion adoption of planning and scheduling best practices throughout the organization.
• Drive improvements in schedule accuracy, inventory turns, throughput, lead times, and labor utilization.
• Lead root cause analysis of schedule disruptions and capacity constraints.
• Implement Lean Manufacturing, Theory of Constraints, and planning optimization techniques.
• Recommend process, technology, and organizational improvements that increase manufacturing performance.
• Mentor production supervisors, planners, and schedulers in planning concepts and scheduling discipline.
• Develop internal planning competencies and standard operating procedures.
• Provide coaching on capacity planning, bottleneck management, workload balancing, and ERP utilization.
• Promote a culture of data-driven decision-making and schedule accountability across manufacturing.

Education / skill requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in supply chain management, Operations Management, Industrial Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, or related field.
• 5 years of production planning, scheduling, operations planning, or supply chain experience in a manufacturing environment.
• Demonstrated experience implementing ERP or Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS) systems.
• Proven success developing finite-capacity scheduling processes.
• Strong understanding of MRP, CRP (Capacity Requirements Planning, Master Scheduling, and Manufacturing Execution concepts.
• Experience using ERP tools to optimize production scheduling and resource utilization.
• Experience leading organizational change and cross-functional process improvements.