Factors affecting schedule nervousness in the production operations of airline catering industry

The airline catering industry is one of the most complex operational systems since caterers need to serve an average of one hundred thousand meals daily with the challenge of unavailability of exact order numbers right up until departure time. Typically, an optimally planned operation schedule is issued that seeks to utilize resources usage, e.g. manpower and machines. Due to the existence of schedule nervousness, operations schedules are unavoidably sub-optimally executed. The aim of this research was to identify operations-related factors that affected schedule nervousness in the production operations of an airline catering company in Thailand. Total data of 5,572 orders from two planning horizons was collected for analysis. Nervousness was quantified by the revision in initial planned schedule and tested with operation-related factors for the relationship. Results showed that forecasting inaccuracy has a positive correlation with schedule nervousness, while an occurrence of buffer stock has a negative relation.