ERP & MRP Planning calculator

Job Shop Dispatch Priority Calculator

Job Shop Dispatch Priority gives schedulers a consistent way to rank competing jobs at a work center.

What this calculator does

  • Score job dispatch priority from due-date urgency, bottleneck impact, and customer or margin importance.
  • a shop-floor supervisor needs to decide which job should run next
  • It creates a weighted priority score for choosing the next job to run.

Formula used

  • Dispatch priority score = due-date urgency × 0.40 + bottleneck impact × 0.35 + customer importance × 0.25

Inputs explained

  • Due-date urgency score: Score higher when the job is late, near its promise date, or blocks shipment.
  • Bottleneck or downstream impact score: Score higher when the job feeds a constraint, assembly, customer line, or critical path.
  • Customer or margin importance score: Score higher for strategic customers, high-margin orders, penalties, or executive commitments.

How to use the result

  • Use it during ERP cleanup, MRP review, production scheduling, S&OP prep, purchasing decisions, shortage meetings, capacity planning, or daily shop-floor execution reviews.
  • This is a planning estimate. Confirm final commitments against current ERP/MRP records, released BOMs and routings, inventory accuracy, supplier commitments, open work orders, quality holds, and shop-floor constraints.

Common questions

  • What is the Job Shop Dispatch Priority calculator for? It creates a weighted priority score for choosing the next job to run.
  • What information do I need before using it? You need due-date urgency, bottleneck impact, and customer/margin importance scores.
  • How should I use the result? Use it to make dispatch decisions transparent and reduce arguments over hot jobs.
  • When is the result only an estimate? It is only an estimate when demand, inventory, lead time, routing hours, setup time, yield, supplier dates, or work-center capacity comes from forecast assumptions or stale ERP data instead of current orders and recent execution history.

Last reviewed 2026-05-12.