Job Operations vs WBS Phase vs Project Jobs

Kinetic ERP
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Hey everybody,
This is a long one, I appreciate in advance anybody who takes the time to ingest it.
I’m just starting to implement scheduling and wanted to get your thoughts about different styles of infrastructure for my specific use.
For the most part, most of our machines are custom and are engineered per order. So we will have a project that will have x# of machines, each machine being it’s own job. Each job needs Mechanical, electrical, and fluid engineering, which are all done by different engineers. A project may have a single mech/fluid/electrical engineer for the entire thing, or a different one for each job, it depends on complexity.
Engineering time needs to be done prior to each job. Some parts are long lead time, so they will be put on a job before it’s fully engineered, and JobHead.Engineered will be set to true so parts will get on order. Jobs are always backward scheduled way before engineering is complete.

I don’t know if making concurrent Engineering ops that are prior to the Production operations on each job is the best route. We backwards schedule and I don’t want the start date of the job to necessarily include engineering time. I know I can tie materials and assemblies to certain operations so maybe I should add the eng ops and just tie assemblies to the production operations?
Engineering also isn’t just a single easy process. There are different phases, reviews, etc. Because of that I want to have visibility into exactly where engineering was in their process, which is also why I don’t think a single engineering op on a job would suffice.

So all that being said I’m looking into making project jobs, using WBS phases, or a combination of both. There are a lot of different combinations and ways to get what I’m going for, so I’m looking for some advice and ideas. Does anybody have experience with WBS and/or project jobs?. What have you found that works or problems you’ve run into? Are they just a logistical nightmare? Am I going completely in the wrong direction and need to be steered back?
I’m effectively starting from scratch, so what would you do in a perfect world?
Any advice is appreciated.

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You can change this setting to Un-engineered if you want in Site Config. Don’t know if that would help your process, but figured I would mention.

I would also look at using the ECO workflow for Engineering. That will give you flexibility with different people doing multiple roles. It will not produce a visual schedule, but does have all of the date fields you need to track progress.

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thanks John, I’ll take a deep dive into ECO Tasks.

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@jkane’s recommendation of ECO Tasks is right on point.

If each machine you build needs to be costed/scheduled/built/delivered individually, I would recommend that each machine have it’s own WBS phase, each with a Phase job for your Engineering time (you can have separate jobs for each type of engineering or a single job with multiple operations) and a Production job for building the finished good. Scheduling the Phase job will NOT impact the scheduling of the Production job.

Your ECO Task setup can allow or disallow other things (like releasing the Production job) until certain steps are completed/approvals received and most importantly, document and date-stamp those steps.

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Want to thank you both again. I’ve been playing around with it and this is exactly what I was looking for. ECO tasks are a wild ride but they do what I need them to.

FYI to anybody who might come across this. CodaBears has a great video on setting up eco tasks.

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