Assessment of Production Scheduling Challenges in a Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Company in Lagos State

This research assesses the production scheduling challenges experienced by a pharmaceutical manufacturing company in Lagos State, South West Nigeria, examining the root causes of schedule deviations and their downstream impact on product availability and customer service levels. Pharmaceutical manufacturing is subject to stringent regulatory requirements and complex multi-stage processes, making production scheduling substantially more challenging than in many other manufacturing contexts. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining analysis of twelve months of production scheduling records with structured interviews involving production planning, procurement, quality assurance, and warehouse management personnel. Schedule performance is measured using on-time-in-full delivery rate, schedule adherence percentage, and average delay duration per production batch. Results reveal an overall schedule adherence rate of sixty-four percent, with quality-related batch holds contributing thirty-one percent of all schedule deviations and raw material shortages accounting for a further twenty-seven percent. Root cause analysis of quality holds identifies documentation errors and in-process testing delays as dominant contributors rather than product quality failures per se. Recommendations include digitising batch manufacturing records to reduce documentation errors, staggering in-process testing to eliminate sample backlog at the quality control laboratory, and establishing minimum stock levels for twenty critical active pharmaceutical ingredients. Keywords: production scheduling, pharmaceutical manufacturing, schedule adherence, Lagos State, quality holds