What type of work is done at a job shop?

The definition of a job shop can be broad or narrow depending on your situation. In this blog I’m going to define a job shop as a company which manufacturers both made-to-order parts and engineer-to-order custom products for a particular custom. Job shops can also by a hybrid of which makes custom products on a customer demand driven basis or they can have a product line in which they manufacturer, sell and/or distribute products which were made in house. Many manufacturers today began as job shops and grew into the other manufacturing processes as volume allowed. The job shop allows entrepreneurs the most flexibility in making a variety of products to meet customer quality and service standards.

Job shops include sheet metal shops, stamping houses, machine shops, wood working, plastics and many other industries which need parts manufactured. When we continue talking about scheduling we are not going to spend too much time on large product manufacturers, i.e. cars, trucks and other assembly line process. Assembly line processes need to be handled differently then most standard job shops.

The basic process a job shop uses to get a job to a customer is

RFQ is submitted to job shop

Job shop provides an estimating and quote to the buyer

Buyer awards the RFQ to the job shop

Job shop creates a sales order

Job shop creates a work order to produce the requirements

Work order is scheduled

Work Order is tracked and closed as the part is manufactured

Job is shipped to customer

As shown, there are a lot of steps a job goes through during a normal life cycle of a made-to-order part.    You can see that the scheduling is in the middle of the process, but is very critical in order to get the job out on time.

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