A building-materials manufacturer, two plants, one country. Schedule adherence below 70%; expediting costs rising. Time horizon: five months.
The diagnosis
Planning ran monthly against a demand signal that moved weekly, and the plant absorbed the difference through informal expediting. The cost of that absorption had never been measured.
Every deviation escalated to the plant manager because no rule existed for deciding at the edge.
The transformation
We wrote the decision rules with the schedulers first, on paper, then deployed bounded agents to apply them: reschedule within tolerance, escalate outside it, log every decision.
The agents own a named scope and can be replaced in under a week. Every decision they make is readable by an auditor.
They wrote the rules with my schedulers before they wrote any code. That is why the schedulers trust it.
What we learned
The paper rules were the deliverable. The agents were an implementation detail — and saying so out loud is what got the plant to adopt them.
We would set the replacement test earlier. Knowing an agent can be switched off in a week is what let the client approve it at all.