I read a pretty good article not long ago on scheduling systems that are used in research and development. The article was called scheduling R&D and it’s on Production scheduling systems .com. The website is e resource for production scheduling solutions and it offers articles on best practices in production scheduling and advanced planning systems for use in manufacturing.

R&D offers some dilemmas which differ for most production scheduling systems. One good example is that most R&D scheduling systems need to account for various job phases. As an example there may be tooling development phases, testing phases and production tuning that occurs in an R&D situation that simply don’t occur in normal production operations. Phased scheduling can occur in normal scheduling systems but it not as common.

Most common production scheduling systems are scheduling a given phase of the manufacturing process. These systems are usually centered on production standards of some sort that tell the system the amount of time required to produce a given amount of product on a given work center. In addition to calcutaing the amount of time required to run the product the systems generally optimize the schedule. R&D applications can also be used to calculate time required to run a given run on a work center but the systems generally require more flexibility to rearrange the timeline as timelines are extended.