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64 The PCB Magazine • February 2014 ARE BORINGLy PREDICTABLE OPERATIONS POSSIBLE? continues nation pressing has been completed, the books have to be deconstructed into panels, where they sometimes have to wait for other panels to catch up in order for them to be combined back again into their specified job lots. It is this reality, present in almost every department and operation in our shop, which overloads our EPS software's ability to predict and forecast; even though our EPS software vendor might claim modeling is occurring behind the scenes, it of- ten proves not to be useful and understandable. Hence, in order to figure out and plan our work, we are left to our own devices and our own sin- gular survival instinct to try to create certainty in our lives, if only for a few hours after a stress- ful manufacturing planning meeting. In the PCB Customized Factory Model, I exploited the use of a relational database struc- table 2: the status of all of the lamination presses at a specific moment in time. table 3: the lamination log record for an entire run of 64 panels. table 4: the lamination log record for an entire run of 64 panels using different press recipes than in table 3.