In this note short?term scheduling and despatching problems are considered. Section I describes the relationship between scheduling decisions and the environment in which these decisions are made. The problem of scheduling can be perceived as the problems of sequencing and the influence of different sequences on the overall performance. The developments in the sequencing theory are briefly described in Section II. The formulations based on the sequencing theory turn out to be rather complex and for large shops do not give very helpful answers. Hence considerable research has been undertaken for studying the effect of different rules, such as first?come? first?served and shortest operation time. The results of several simulation studies are given in Section III. An information system is needed to back up scheduling decisions being made. The description of such a computerized system for a shop is given in Section IV.