This paper presents a generic heuristic-based scheduling solution. It highlights the flexibility that a simple heuristic method can offer and shows that using the ISA-95 standard it is possible to express the most relevant problem requirements. In order to illustrate the possible benefits, the paper also compares the solution quality of a smaller scale example scheduling problem to a rigorous mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) approach and shows how a heuristic approach scales towards large-size industrial problems. The paper concludes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches, showing that for certain types of problems, the heuristic approach is fully sufficient, even if it cannot be expected to result in optimal solutions. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.