3. Develop a plan to deal with the situation and try to get the production schedule back under control under the constraints listed.

No matter how many times Justin Wang, the master scheduler for Johnston Products, tried, he couldn’t seem to get it through people’s minds. They kept trying to “front load” the production schedule by attempting to catch up with production they failed to make the previous week, and the problem appeared to be getting worse. It seemed to happen every week, and the only way Justin could get things back to a realistic position was to completely reconstruct the entire master schedule—usually about every three weeks.