I'm not sure order date is a factor, or at least a large factor (other than possibly informing mold order). I'd imagine colors might be the biggest variable for production scheduling still within a given mold run. Per a 2007 interview w/ Jim Blanchard of ASM:
The colors are made from formulas that were handed down and they are basically unchanged, probably since the 1960's or 70's. For the last 40 years we've been making the same colors. We've actually introduced very few new colors, because literally...we already make too many colors. There is a logistic problem with having so many colors. It's one of the reasons why we get bogged down with orders so often. People don't realized, for instance, every one of those colors has to be made from scratch. We only make about one color a day, since we make it in quantities. We have over twenty colors. Now, that means if you order a red chip with a combination of two color spot of a lavender and a green...if we don't have all three colors, sometimes your chip could have been done in a week's time but we don't have that little lavender spot and we're not going to make lavender for the next two weeks, because we circle around where the greatest orders are. If we have a lot of [orders for] red, and we're out of red we're going to make red sooner than we are going to make lavender. So your lavender spot might not be made for two or three weeks, and it's going to hold up your order. This is one of the logistic problems we always deal with. Sometimes, if we get an order where someone orders 30,000 red chips, we might have to roll red for three days, just to get enough red to produce that order. So, it's things like that, which quite often hold up orders that people don't understand why. Many times people will have a 300-chip order, we will have two of the chips done, ready to go. Yet, we're held up on the third chip therefore the order is being held up for one color. Sometimes we can't make that color for two weeks. So that order literally sits on the shelf for two weeks for the lack of one lavender spot color. But, there's no other way to do it. We have to complete the order in total, in order to ship it. Sometimes it gets literally, we'll get down to one color that we don't have that holds up an order.