Any suggested best practices for scheduling job start based on completion of another job?
We’re exploring ways to track ‘indirect’ labor such as engineering tasks. These won’t be operations in the mfg job because they’re not always required and time is not costed to the job hourly.
Thinking we will try having Project Phases: pre-production, production, post-production. Engineering operations would be in pre-prod phase job and must be predecessor to MRP jobs in the production phase.
I would check out a project job if you want indirect time recorded to the entire project. That could be PM time, travel, etc.
WBS phase job may be better in the progress you mentioned for pre-production engineering time. Once that phase closes your production phase kicks in with your normal mfg jobs.
Thanks for your reply. That’s what we’re hoping will just work but what’s unclear is whether global scheduling knows phase 1 project job is predecessor for all phase 2 non-project mfg jobs(?)
Partly kidding because you might actually have enough reason to keep track, but the question remains. Does it really matter, or is this just something someone is asking for that won’t amount to anything meaningful?
It’s a good question and helpful exercise to write a formal answer.
The main reason is engineering capacity is a bottleneck with little visibility.
As an ETO job shop, whether formal engineering required or simple drawing review, nothing can proceed without engineering.
Meanwhile, eng mgrs can’t estimate time to complete when busy engineering so we’re blind on the Eng backlog.
Most jobs don’t have direct billable engineering and eng time varies greatly job to job. Eng costs are in our overhead rate on every estimate but perhaps shouldn’t be to the same extent. Because it’s not linearly related to prod labor. Real cost may win more jobs.
Some jobs do have direct engineering so we need to track those hours. The idea is to track all hours to get the visibility into these unknowns.
We’ve intended to track Eng time for a while and recognize a pattern in the data showing us a good-n-nuff approach to these problems may emerge such that time tracking is no longer needed but we need the data first.
Regardless, Eng capacity has a direct effect on start date. Scheduling can’t work without it. Even if we throw a DWGApproval Op10 on every job, we don’t even know the est hours.
I can see an estimated approval date with frequent review being a minimum viable solution to the schedule problem but the production schedule needs engineering as a predecessor. Some how.
I would personally recommend using the ECO functionality. That does not take care of the time tracking, but that could be done elsewhere if you want (maybe a Project). No job can start without a fully defined method, so if every part has an ECO, that is taking care of the Engineering being a predecessor.
Makes sense to avoid job start before engineering but doesn’t help with the ‘when can we start/finish’?
We’re still refining how we’ll finalize ‘engineering’ methods in the system, but it’s not likely that actual engineers will do that task. For example, most methods are created by Estimators/PMs for quotes and only reach the enginneers if the sale is made.
A fully defined method will come off the drawings done by engineering and the conversion between Rev 0 (quote) and Rev A (engineered) will likely happen by PMs doing take-offs or CADLink plus manual PM tweaking.
I guess this speaks to Available-to-promise and What-if scheduling.
Been down your road a couple of times. Unfortunately, with ETO you will almost never “know” when you can start/finish. There is too much unknown to know.
When can we start the Job? - We don’t even know how to make it yet.
When will the engineering be done? - Depends on how good the models/drawings are.
You are on the right track. You need to get to the 80/20 rule. 80% flow as predicted and 20% don’t. I would work on defining buckets for the work coming in. Something like easy/medium/hard? Have the best of the best be the ones to categorize. Most people would say don’t waste their time, but their knowledge is what will help in defining them. Keep on tracking the hours and honing the process until everyone is happy.
