Hi, is it possible to create a job without a demand link?
I would like to use the scheduling system to organise resources (people) and hours available for drawing / engineering work, without producing something at the end of it.
I’m not sure if it’s possible, or if there is a better way of managing these hours.
Maintenance Job might work for that.
Thanks, I’ll take a look.
Using the Project Module with Project jobs could accomplish this but if you don’t have the Project module you can still report engineering hours against a job but you will need a make to stock link for a quantity of 1 so you can report time. Report the hours against the operations but you don’t have to report any quantities. When you close the job without shipping or receiving to inventory you will get a mfg-variance. If you use a product group such as Engineering Time on the job, in the GL Control code for that product group you can set the mfg-var to to to an Engineering Expense account on your GL to record the engineering cost for the period
Not sure if your engineering needs are related to jobs/parts specifically, but we have an Engineering operation step as the first operation in parts that allows up to assign engineering resources to procure drawings. We use a production standard of 0 mins/piece, but you could use expected time, if know, to generate a real-time schedule, We use it for resource workload visibility created through a dashboard that removes the job once the engineer has clocked off as complete.
Hi Troy, thanks for the suggestion - the ‘drawing’ jobs actually need to be scheduled and completed before ‘production’ jobs that they relate to (do not need to connect to directly), so unfortunately we cannot have the drawing op as part of the main job.
Hi Mark,thanks for the reply. I have started looking at the project module. When creating a job purely from the project entry screen, I can’t see a way of creating a production quantity, without which I can’t get it to show the time taken in the scheduling board (even with fixed hours). Is there any way to enter a production quantity of 1?
A couple questions come to mind here:
What do you plan to do with all the labor costs from this engineering job?
Are they important?
How tightly linked is the engineering effort in relation to the production effort?
One approach might be to add a “Make” item (could be a “part on the fly”) to the production job that would represent the engineering effort. This way you could create a job for that item that would have no materials and only your engineering operations. If you put this item at the ‘0’ level and link to production start operation, it would be required to be complete prior to production start.
Another option might be to just make the engineering part to inventory. This way you would have a demand link so it can be scheduled but it might create a costing problem later. You could just add that part that was made to inventory to the production job later and the cost would transfer to that job. Or, just adjust it out of inventory to a specific GL account that would allow you to track it better.
There also might be some options with non-quantity bearing parts that would help eliminate transactions but I would have to do some digging on that.
Hopefully this gives you some more to think about.
Ed
Hi Ed, thanks for the reply, the first suggestion may not work as we want to do the engineering work before scheduling the production job. This is because part of the engineering time is the time spent making changes to the production job. We’d like to release the production job once this engineering job is complete.
The second option may work, we don’t want to cost for the engineering time yet, just use the scheduling system to manage our team’s hours. We have the project module, but I cannot seem to create more than a single job for this project. Ideally we would have each project with several ‘engineering’ jobs related to it, creating the part ‘project_XX’
If you go the Project route, you can certainly add as many jobs to the project as you want but there is a lot to think about here. When you create a project, you can create a “project” job which is a job “type”. You can add WBS phases which can also have “project” jobs associated to them. You can also create “manufacturing” jobs and associate them with the project. Here, you can have as many “manufacturing” jobs as you feel are necessary. The thing to explore is that project jobs and manufacturing jobs are not the same thing exactly.