How honest your plan is with your floor. The internal-facing twin of OTD.
Schedule adherence is the metric that tells you whether the plan and the floor are friends or strangers. A shop where the schedule is built in the office and discovered on the floor at the start of each shift will have poor adherence for reasons that have nothing to do with operator effort. A shop where the schedule reflects what the line actually can do, and the line treats the schedule as a commitment, will have adherence in the high 90s without heroics. The difference is in how the plan is built, not in how hard the team is pushed.
"The plan you can hit on a normal Tuesday is the plan worth committing to. Everything else is hopeful arithmetic."
Schedule adherence compares what was planned for a window against what was actually produced inside that window. The window matters: most operational shops measure by shift or by day, because anything shorter is noise and anything longer disguises the misses. The comparison should be unit-by-unit or line-by-line, not just total volume, because building 50 of the wrong thing while missing 50 of the right thing is not adherence even if the totals match.
A working schedule adherence number depends on a few discipline choices:
Schedule adherence is also a measure of how good the planning function is. Persistently poor adherence usually means the schedule is overcommitted, not that the floor is underperforming. The planner pushing tight commitments without input from the floor will see adherence drop. The fix lives in the planning process more often than in the shop.
Imagine a 30-person contract manufacturer building precision components for medical and industrial customers. The shop runs three lines, each with its own daily schedule pushed out by a planner using an MRP report. Adherence has been hovering at 78 percent for six months, and management has tried operator training, shift adjustments, and a new supervisor on the worst line. Nothing has moved the number.
The diagnosis comes from sitting with the planner for a day. The schedule is built from order due dates without checking line capacity by mix. A line that can run 200 units a day of simple parts gets scheduled for 200 units of complex parts on a day with three changeovers. The line cannot win. The 22-point miss is not an operator problem; it is a planning problem.
The fix is a planning rhythm change. A short daily meeting between the planner and the line supervisors at the end of each shift reviews tomorrow's schedule for feasibility. The planner adjusts based on the supervisors' input about mix, changeovers, and known issues. Adherence climbs from 78 to 91 over six weeks. Nobody pushed the operators harder. The schedule got more honest, and the floor delivered against an honest schedule. That is usually how adherence improves.
Schedule adherence is the internal-facing companion of on-time delivery and a critical input to build-to-schedule, which adds a sequence and mix discipline on top of pure volume. The visual artifact most shops use to track adherence is the production control board, a planned-versus-actual board visible on the floor. Stable adherence is much easier to maintain when production is leveled through heijunka.
The questions we hear most about this term.
Long-form guides that pick up where this definition leaves off, written for manufacturers running Arda today.
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