Excessive Manual Interventions and Ad Hoc Flow Controls

$100,000-$180,000 annually in engineering and technician intervention labor; estimated 15-20% cycle time inflation from non-optimized flow • $110,000-$190,000 annually in engineering and technician labor spent on manual optimization; estimated 10-18% cycle time expansion due to suboptimal sequencing • $120,000-$180,000 annually in wasted specialist labor

Capacity and flow are steered via ad hoc rule setting outside of the optimizer: planners and quality scientists manually define and adjust hard-down holds, lot priorities, skip rules, and reroutes using spreadsheets and email/chat, then re-key them into MES or dispatching systems. • Capacity modeling in Excel with scenario tabs, manual lot prioritization based on customer order date, phone calls between scheduling and equipment teams, shift supervisor informal lot routing decisions • Custom database scripts maintained by one engineer; Manual WIP tracking in daily reports; Slack notifications for critical queue events