Sample frameDay 248·Operations · Levelling

Good morning. Demand arrives in lumps. Nothing obliges you to pass them straight through.

Operations.

The Level Schedule

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

Look at what your team actually started in each of the last four weeks — not what was sold, what was released into the work — and how far apart are the biggest and the smallest of those weeks? If you don't have the numbers to hand, the shape is almost certainly your order book's, because that's the default: whatever arrives gets released, and the swing gets paid for by everyone standing behind you.

The idea

On a Toyota line there's a rack of pigeonholes on the wall — one column for each slice of the day, one row for each model, a card in every slot. Someone pulls the next card when the interval comes round, and that card, not the order book, decides what gets built. It's called a heijunka box, and it's the least glamorous instrument in the Toyota Production System and possibly the most load-bearing. Levelling means releasing work smoothed rather than in the shape the orders arrived: smoothed in volume, so roughly the same quantity goes in each day, and smoothed in mix, so a day's output alternates between models in small repeating quantities instead of running one until lunchtime. It sounds like ignoring your customers and it's very nearly the opposite — what gets smoothed is the release of work, never the promise made to the buyer, and the promise gets more reliable precisely because the operation stops lurching. The logic underneath it, which Yasuhiro Monden documented in detail, is that a peak passed straight through has to be paid for everywhere behind it: every station, every supplier and every shift roster ends up sized for the highest day it will ever see, then sits underused for the rest of the month. Absorb the peak once, at the point of release, and everything behind you gets to be steady.

The framework

01
Separate what you sell from what you release.
These are two taps and most businesses have welded them together. The order book is what customers do; the release schedule is what you choose to start. When an order goes straight from the inbox into the work queue, you've handed your customers the job of scheduling your operation, and they're not doing it with your capacity in mind. Putting a deliberate step between the two — a daily or weekly release, decided by a named person, drawn from a visible queue — is the whole intervention. It costs nothing, needs no software, and it's the point at which levelling becomes possible at all.
02
Volume first, mix second.
Level in two stages, because they're not equally hard. Volume levelling is arithmetic: take the period's demand, divide by working days, and release roughly that much each day whatever landed that morning. Mix levelling is the second layer — instead of running all of A on Monday and all of B on Wednesday, interleave them in small repeating quantities so everyone upstream sees a steady draw of each thing rather than a famine followed by a flood. Most of the available benefit sits in the first stage, and almost everybody skips it to argue about the second.
03
Absorb the peak at the front, where it's cheap and visible.
The peak has to be absorbed somewhere, and at the front it costs one thing you can see and quote: a published lead time, a booking window, or a small stock of your fastest-moving line. Pass the same peak through instead and it gets paid for over and over behind you — overtime, expediting, half-finished work, and the mistakes a lurching week produces, none of which land on a report with anyone's name attached. Size that absorber against the swing you measured in those four weeks rather than the worst month you can imagine, then quote it rather than hoping nobody notices. Which currency your operation pays for variability in more broadly has its own morning later in this elective.
04
The exception that breaks the level.
One day a very large order arrives and everyone in the room wants to tear up the schedule for it. Sometimes that's right — but write the rule now, in calm conditions, instead of improvising it in front of a big customer. Above what size do you break the level, who signs that off, and what's the alternative when you don't? The alternative is usually better than it sounds: split the order across the release window, or quote a date read straight off the queue rather than promising one you'll fund out of everyone else's week.

Members only · 4 principles + template + AI mentor

364 more frameworks are waiting.

The Level Schedule is Day 1 of 365. One framework every morning for a year — across strategy, sales, negotiation, leadership, and more.

$1 /day

Billed $365/yr · cancel any time

365 frameworks

12 topics · templates · AI mentor

Reserve your place — $365/yr →

One payment a year · the whole library · no auto-renewal.

More Operations frameworks

All 24 operations frameworks →