Schedulers are expected to make a schedule for and release production orders. However, in an alternative perspective, the schedulers’ activities could rather be described as co-ordinating the demands of the customers, as interpreted by the sales departments, with the possibilities and limitations of the existing production systems. The aim with this paper is to describe how four studied schedulers coped with this task and the different means they used to manage the conflicting logic between production and sales. The schedulers were studied using activity analysis comprising initial descriptions of their work and its context, subsequent observations of actual work activities during one week for each scheduler as well as follow-up interviews.
The results show that the competing logics of sales and production were apparent at the operative every day level and must be coped with. Schedulers developed a variety of different means to reach acceptable compromises for both production and sales departments. Beside the main technical instrument for coordinating purposes, the business software, the studied schedulers used social skills, judgements, bargaining, and information collection and manipulations as important means to maintain a schedule in a complex and varying context. Conclusions are that schedulers use a variety of tools, especially human capabilities for coping with their task. Based on this finding, it can be questioned whether scheduling may be efficiently performed without a large portion of human work.