Quick and dirty overview on how we achieve scheduling to meet deadlines:
We use a job tracking system, where by all jobs issued are allocated a job number, a budgeted number of hours and a expected completion date.
What we then do is have job fabrication cards issued to the allocated workforce they enter the number of hours worked and our QC floor staff enter progress on a daily basis, form this we can calculate estimated completion time via hours burnt and percentage complete, this gives us some flexibility where we can add more staff if required to meet the desired completion date. Our main driver is the completion date if more hours are burnt than budgeted for then we do a analysis in regard to why, and feed the actuals back to our estimating department to fine tune the processes.