Hey everyone! We are trying to go down the finite path. Is anyone willing to knowledge share what they’ve learned and collaborate? We keep running into roadblocks and feel we can’t be the only users with these issues. We’re hoping someone might be willing to work with me to help us be successful. We’re in the aerospace manufacturing industry if that helps!
That’s a pretty open-ended question. What kinds of roadblocks? Are your Resources and Resource Groups set up properly, do your operation production standards reflect reality, does your production calendar properly match your availability, do your shop floor operators accurately enter their time?
A challenging path you have chosen, padawan…
Our manufacturing follows a process flow - surface mount, solder, programming all the way to packing.
We decided to go down the finite route in small chunks, so planned the first operation of the process finitely.
Once you have learnt the lessons from this, you can look at the subsequent operations.
One issue is often with people-related resources ; they can be moved around, can do overtime, can call sick on monday…
One thing we did is configure only the important and/or bottleneck resources as finite (machines and workcenter in our case) and let people be infinite. This seems to be a reasonable first step toward finite scheduling.
It’s worth mentioning that if you have people working on different shifts, you shouldn’t set individuals up as resources. It’s tempting, but don’t.
Job scheduling is looking for a resource to match each JobOpDtl record. If you added the “Welders” resource group that has 2 x day and 2 x afternoon people, the schedule selects 1. And keeps them. The job operation will run until that resources shift finishes. Then it stops, and waits for them to come back. It won’t schedule it to continue with someone else on the next shift.
And remember a schedule isn’t aiming for perfection. Guffery will call in with a toothache tomorrow, and that means nobody can change the tooling on “Big Betty”. There goes the perfect schedule.