Hello All, I’m currently looking into Alternate Methods. We currently only run production in one plant, but we have multiple part numbers that can be ran on more than one machine in the plant. For example, the primary resource for part X might be busy handling another job, but we have another machine that can make part X as well and at a different rate than the primary resource.
What I’m wondering, is how can we set a part up in the Engineering Workbench to have Alternate Methods? I have seen many posts where people setup new revisions for each machine but I don’t find this very feasible…
Any insight anyone else has experienced while doing this would be greatly appreciated!
Pardon my ignorance but isn’t this partly a planning/scheduling issue? A quick test and I can create multiple alternate methods on the same site, so my thought is you have an alternate setup for each cell/workstation/machine, then change the scheduled resources associated with each alternate.
Caveat, I am no Job/MRP expert. This is just what I have researched and messed round with the demo company.
So any “Real” Manufacturing experts… Please school us.
What you are trying to achieve can be done with Capabilities and doesn’t require multiple alternate methods. You do need Advanced Planning and Scheduling though.
With your resource/groups and operations setup - you would add capabilities for the operations with the production/setup factors and priorities. You then update your methods to add the capability under Scheduling Resources.
MRP will first look at the amount of time the operation would take with that capability (faster machine, shortest run time) and see if it’s available. If not, it will move to the next. If there are multiple machines with the same run time, then it uses the priority factor to decide.