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Weekly Production Schedule from Confirmed Orders

Example prompt: "Every Friday at 2pm, sequence next week's confirmed sales orders against our line and machine capacity in Google Sheets. Flag any capacity conflicts and material shortages, and put a draft schedule in Google Sheets in front of the production manager."

The Problem

The weekly production schedule is the Friday afternoon spreadsheet that decides next week's pay. Done well it takes two or three hours of patient cross-referencing — pulling the confirmed orders, opening the routings, checking the capacity sheet, checking the stock sheet, sequencing the operations so the laser cutter is not booked at the same time as it is finishing the previous job, double-checking nothing has been promised that we have not got the steel for. Done badly it gets done late on Friday in a hurry and Monday morning is the wrong four jobs on the wrong three machines while sales explains to a customer why the promise will slip.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We build a workflow that runs every Friday afternoon. An integration step reads the confirmed sales orders due for next week and pulls the routings, capacity, BoMs, and current stock from the same Google Sheet. A code step expands each order into its operations, allocates them to days within each work centre's available minutes, respects routing order, and checks every component against the BoM and current stock to flag material shortages. The output is a draft schedule sheet with one tab per work centre and a summary tab with every order tagged 'Scheduled', 'Material short', or 'Over capacity'. An LLM step writes a short one-page schedule note that captures the totals — how full each work centre is, which orders are flagged, what needs sales to step in. The draft sheet, the note, and a Gmail to the production manager all land before Friday afternoon ends; the production manager and sales sit down with the conflicts on the same afternoon they happened rather than discovering them on Monday. Glass Box preview shows the schedule and the flagged orders before any draft is filed.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (schedule): Every Friday at 14:00.
  2. Step 1 (integration): Read the 'Sales Orders', 'Routings', 'Capacity', 'BoMs', and 'Stock' tabs of the manufacturing Google Sheet.
  3. Step 2 (code): Pick out confirmed orders with a promised ship date in next week; expand each into routing operations; allocate operations to days within each work centre's available minutes by priority then ship date, respecting routing order.
  4. Step 3 (code): For each scheduled order, sum the BoM components and flag any order where a component is short of stock; flag any order whose operations did not fit within next week's capacity.
  5. Step 4 (integration): Write the draft schedule as a new Google Sheet in the 'Production Schedules' Drive folder, one tab per work centre and a summary tab.
  6. Step 5 (llm): Write a short schedule note as a Google Doc in the same folder summarising totals and flagged orders.
  7. Step 6 (integration): Draft a Gmail to the production manager with both files linked; post a one-message summary in #production on Slack so the production manager and sales can resolve flags on Friday afternoon.

Integrations Used

  • Google Sheets — sales orders, routings, capacity, BoMs, stock; the draft schedule is also written as a sheet
  • Google Docs — the one-page schedule note that the production manager actually reads
  • Google Drive — the 'Production Schedules' folder where each week's draft is filed
  • Gmail — the Friday email to the production manager with the schedule and note linked
  • Slack — the #production channel where sales and production close out flagged orders

Who This Is For

The production manager at a small make-to-order or batch manufacturer — anywhere with three to a dozen work centres, fifty to a few hundred orders a week, and a sales team that confirms promises faster than the schedule gets rebuilt.

Time & Cost Saved

A careful weekly schedule build is two to three hours of cross-referencing every Friday — fifty to a hundred and fifty hours of production-management time a year, on top of the Mondays-gone-wrong that the rushed version produces. This workflow turns it into thirty minutes of reviewing the draft and walking it past sales before the end of the day. The bigger gain is the customer promises that do not slip because the conflict was caught on Friday rather than discovered on Tuesday.