We produce paper bags, and they machines we run are variable sized machines. We can run several different product lines on them with anywhere between 2-8 hours (sometimes more) of changeover between them. Epicor doesn’t seem to have a way to know contextually that these jobs need to run in a specific order so what we have been doing is taking say 30hrs to a week’s worth of load, scheduling it immediate and manipulating global sequence so at least for a week we can set the exact order we need them to be in to minimize changeovers.
The rock and hard place is Epicor can only schedule based on the information it knows. But how do I tell it if you do the jobs in the order you want it will add 8 more hours to the load of maintenance jobs. Under those circumstances it would make different decisions.
Short of creating a changeover job and manually placing it in the order or adding setup time to the last job for that size once the lineup has been created. Not good options though. We run into this issue as well.
We created our own Priority code for schedule but it is manually manipulated. A printed schedule is created based on that Priority Code. We do this for a variety of reasons such as the color of resin (run jobs with the same color back to back), use of a “family” tool (more than one part can be run using a mold with runner shutoffs), etc.
We do use capabilities which helps with some of this in normal scheduling.
That’s about where we have taken it as well. I think my next step is to use our manual global sequence number to take our jobs and schedule them in the order we want myself using another process and the schedule engine. I was hoping someone else came up with something creative, but scheduling by attribute in Epicor is a lacking feature that I’m not sure how to get around other than DIY.