We are interested in rolling out Capability scheduling but do not want to make each employee a resource if possible. The approach we would like to take is to make a Resource Group containing 3 different Resources that are named based on employee experience level (LVL1, LVL2, LV3).
They envision the scheduling engine scheduling operations to certain resources depending on the experience level required to complete it. Also, how does the Shift setup data impact how the system would go about scheduling the Operation across multiple shifts within the same Capability requirements?
Also, we are having trouble with the process to get the amount of time an operation will take to decrease based on having multiple resources working on it simultaneously. We brought up scheduling blocks but they have a strong desire not to use them for some reason.
You will need to tell the scheduler how many at each level you have. Abstracting them from the actual employee is a good idea, and is what we did as well, so maybe three groups (level 1,2,3) with each group containing the number of employees that have that skill level.
THIS is the big downfall of the scheduler currently. Once a job operation has been assigned a resource, that resource is the only one who can work on that job. For example, and operation requires 10 hours of work and is started first thing on a Tuesday morning on an 8 hour shift. The scheduler will set it up to run for 8 hours on Tuesday, and 2 ours on Wednesday - each time with the same resource.
We virtualized/abstracted our employee resources so that we told the Scheduler that a ‘resource’ is available for 20 hours each day (two 10 hour human shifts). This allows the operations to run for as long as it needs, even if it’s 48 hours. All we need to do is make sure there is a real employee to work at each location/shift a virtual resource is required.
This is tougher, because unless you know ahead of time that you will use >1 resources, the estimated time will never be lower, and your scheduled time is based on the Estimate. However, there are some other things like concurrent capacity and crew size you should look into. Check the Scheduling Technical Reference for the ‘modifiers’ section.