Does anyone know if it is possible to have Employee Resources be Finite but the Machine Resources be Infinite? I figured that if you set it up this way, it would technically make the machines Finite because a Finite employee was scheduled for it. Instead of that happening, the engine will schedule 3 employees on different jobs on 1 machine at the same time. Needless to say, you can not run 3 different jobs on 1 machine at the same time with 3 different employees.
I would like to avoid making all resources Finite, but that may just be what I have to do. The current site using scheduling has a horizon of 5 days, so it should not kill Global Scheduling, but at our bigger manufacturing facility that is not using Global Scheduling it might.
@jkane We’ve made everything finite. Why do you not want to? I never tried your experiment but I understand finite to be the only way to not overlap operations and overload resources.
Our situation - We do finite plus we virtualized our employees into a single 20 hour shift per day because our job operations cannot stop just because a shift ends. Our operations all have a machine and operator resource requirements. Since what/how we manufacture is so singular in nature in each operation, we cannot have overlap - nor are our operations a short duration which may allow some infinite scheduling and adaptation on the shop floor. We have about 900 open jobs, single assembly, 3-5 operations. Global Scheduling takes 30-45 minutes at 1am.
I know some shops use infinite but 've never really understood how you can truly schedule operations on something with infinite availability We do set a finite horizon after which everything goes infinite, but that’s the “big bucket” that no one has to pay attention.
Thanks @MikeGross . My concern is around Global Scheduling duration. For our current site, this won’t be an issue as the horizon is only 5 days. But at our larger facility, I’m thinking that the horizon will need to be 30 days at the least. What is your horizon?
We actually have every employee set up as a resource and then use capabilities to build skill matrices for the scheduling engine to pick the correct employee.
If you are running GS in under an hour, I don’t think I need to worry. Thanks for the input.
This really is a limitation of Epicor, you have 2 factors that go into most work. The machines/worksations and the people. Especially for job shops. You could have 2 workstations that could do the work, and 5 people that could work there, but those 5 people can also be busy on 10 other workstations. So depending on the mix of work at the moment, the workstation could be your bottle neck, or the people could be your bottle neck. The way epicor is built, you get one or the other. You get a singular resource to schedule an operation when it usually takes 2. (and changing the setup to go back and forth would be a HUGE pain)
It’s not really to be infinite, it’s to be able to schedule to the orders, then you move around orders as necessary, and if you tried to schedule finite, you have too many setup points to get things like purchase suggestions to come close enough to be able to operate. Especially when a majority of the parts you make you only make once EVER.
We recently went to global scheduling and I set my horizon out a full 365 days. Granted I only have three resource groups with about 20 machines each set to finite. Our employees are sort of virtualized like @MikeGross said. We have a few thousand jobs, with lots of ops and sub-assemblies.
I scheduled two tasks for nightly processing. They run without issues.
@jkane - We have a 365 day fence - a full year. We also have about 60 capabilities set up to pull the correct machine (instead of operator). I think it’s doing just fine
@Banderson - Totally agree. In our case, our people are our bottleneck right now, our current setup allows for zero overload/overlap, and we backwards schedule to our shipping dates so we’re never late (sometimes, but not because of the schedule). We’re getting close to turning on material constraints - some of which we make ourselves. All of this means infinite will never work for us. We simply cannot move orders around once they are started.
It really comes down to how your shop works - and understanding how Epicor works - then choosing the right path for your shop.
@NateS & @MikeGross , thanks for letting me know. I guess I was worrying for no reason.
And yes, there is no single answer to how to schedule. It really depends on multiple factors that are different across companies. I believe that the thought behind Infinite is that you manage the schedule based on Overload. If one day has 30 hours booked on a machine, but the next two days are under 8 hours, you just identify the most important job and tell them to run it and catch up on the other jobs over the next two days.
We do set a finite horizon after which everything goes infinite, but that’s the “big bucket” that no one has to pay attention.
