2026 Medeco Team

The Challenge

Medeco's production schedulers carried the order intake stage of the scheduling process almost entirely by hand. Working inside Oracle JD Edwards, they pulled pending orders from the scheduling workbench and department load reports out of the ERP, rebuilt them in Excel cheat sheets, and worked line by line through lead time and promise date calculations for every incoming order. Because the ERP itself could not be modified, any improvement had to be built around it. As order volume grew, that manual foundation left inconsistent logic across schedulers, scattered inputs, and little room to scale.

The Solution

The student team started with qualitative and quantitative discovery, interviewing schedulers and area managers, shadowing daily scheduling tasks to identify bottlenecks, and analyzing ERP workbench data, load reports, and the existing cheat sheets. That workflow analysis pointed to the most repetitive calculations in order intake as the highest-value target for automation.

From there the team built a standardized Excel toolkit that closes a five-step loop. Schedulers input load reports from the ERP; the toolkit automates load-to-capacity mapping, aggregating components into categories and assigning them to the appropriate production week while accounting for documented scheduling exceptions and flagging weeks where load exceeds capacity; it calculates lead times and schedule dates from the next available production week; it summarizes incoming and scheduled orders in a central file carrying high-level metrics; and the scheduler then schedules to production. The design reduces a multi-step manual routine to a refresh button, standardizes lead time and promise date logic, centralizes inputs into one system, and eases knowledge transfer by staying in a tool Medeco already uses.

The Impact

The toolkit produced a 25% reduction in order processing time and a 15% improvement for multi-line orders, with the recovered hours reallocated toward scheduling and floor communication rather than maintaining the process. Against a fully loaded scheduling rate of $27 per hour, twenty hours recovered each week across two schedulers represents $28,080 per year in labor value, and the added capacity let the team absorb its workload without backfilling a part-time role, worth another $11,232 per year, for an estimated $39,312 in annual labor value. The toolkit also builds clean historical data, giving Medeco a foundation for inventory integration, further automation, and predictive scheduling.