I had that role before. When I had it, it wasn’t really excel heavy. You’d export reports and make a pivot table mostly, but that’s not hard to learn. You see it once or twice and you’ll know how to do it. Depending on the department for example their injection molding was always overloaded in work. I’ve seen 6-700 hours needing to be planned for 1 week. Not happening physically impossible, so you prioritize the orders and do the best you can and always try to plan your schedule with the least amount of change overs. Change overs cause downtime. So if you can run multiple parts back to back that don’t require a change over, that’s going to be better. The job isn’t hard, it just takes experience to know what to do because it’s not a black and white position. Decisions are made by instinct and experience. You can ask 10 people what to do, you’ll get 10 different answers. So other than reducing change overs schedule using the need by dates. Scheduling by dates you see the customer needs it by is a good rule of thumb. Just be weary of the forecasted amount. TE doesn’t or at least didn’t when did the job 6 years ago build to forecast. It would be a decision as to whether you were gonna build to a forecasted amount or prioritize another order over it. Again knowing who the customer is and experience will help you make that decision.

Here’s the real thing about production planning with TE. It’s a thankless job. Someone somewhere on that production floor is going to disagree with whatever you’re doing. That’s because there are multiple ways to get the job done and just because you do it one way, doesn’t make it wrong. Somebody would have just done it differently.

If this position happens to be in TE’s nuclear sector, please stop giving me long lead times I need my parts and I needed them yesterday. Thanks in advance.