Labor Resources = Actual Staff?

Kinetic ERP
1

Good afternoon,
We still don’t use scheduling in Epicor the way it should be used.

We have setup a resource group simply called ‘labor’. To this we added 30 resources to represent the 30 folks on the floor that can be applied as labor.

Today we are considering what the impacts would be if we changed our labor resources to equate to real people. So instead of Labor1, I would make the resourceID = the clock ID 1234, and description = John Doe. With this approach we think we could apply calendars to individual staff members, and have scheduling take their calendars into account when scheduling jobs/ops.

We realize that this will force us to update all of our jobs and revisions to use the new resources.

What is the consensus on adding actual labor people as resources? Any tips/tricks/ or gotchyas to look out for?
Thanks for your time!
Nate

2

Followup: we have our operations setup utilizing capabilities. So for the Vertical Milling Operation (op 4A), a labor capability and a machine capability are required. For labor, it just picks from the list of labor resources that I added to the capability L4A. I think I can just delete this list of generic labor resources, and replace them with the actual staff. :thinking:

3

Haven’t gone down this path yet, but we’ve been thinking about it as well. We are working under the impression that actual clock numbers are okay, but we would still want to schedule against a resource GROUP, and not an individual.

If you schedule using ACTUAL clock numbers, like you describe, and that employee leaves, you have to revisit methods.

We’re considering making it two levels… so, instead of having (1) Labor Resource Group, we would have many Resource Groups based on Trade/Skill level… then, yes, your individual resources could be individual people within those groups.

For example: This operation on this job (for a critical customer/higher standards, etc.) requires “Welder Level A”.

The same operation on a different job (for a less critical customer) could require “Welder Level B”.

We have 5 welders: (1) is Level A (expert), (3) are Level B (proficient), (1) is Level C (apprentice).

If you use “Welder Level B”, than any employee within that resource group could be considered in the scheduling of that operation.

If a “Welder Level B” quits/leaves, you can remove them from the group. If one gets promoted to Level A, you can move the resource.

So, you’d be scheduling against the Resource Group, and not the individual resource, so you wouldn’t have to revisit individual methods (I think).

Not sure if you can say a “B” level job can use both a “B” and an “A” level? That might get into capabilities?

4

Yes, with capabilities you can add multiple resource from disparate resource groups to one capability.

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5

We’ve started using “generic” resources for our people so we can see total capacity constraints without needing to update calendars each time someone calls out sick or takes PTO. We’re underestimating our available hours by the average amount of time lost per shift to handle this.

One reason we are not going with Employee = Resource is because we run 3 shifts. If Employee 1234 is scheduled to start a job on first shift, Epicor will expect the job to wait on second and third shift until Employee 1234 is back in the next morning to finish the job. In reality someone on second shift would finish that job and then start the next job (or it would continue to third, etc. etc.). Once Epicor schedules an operation to a specific resource, the operation will “wait” on that resource over any non-available hours on the calendar until it finishes. It won’t know it should “jump” to another resource during second or third shift hours. Or if there’s a way to do that, we haven’t found it…

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6

Ohh I have heard about that before! Thank you for pointing it out. I f we find a way to get around this I will post it.

7

What @NateS said. If you have the advanced planning and scheduling module, your example is exactly what Capabilities do. The extra added benefit of Capabilities is if you create everything as a Capability, you do not need to update MOMs. Just update the Capability and it AUTOMAGICALLY updates your schedule.

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8

I created this sample graphic to explain to our plant managers how we would set it up. Each green cell is an individual blanker, the rows are the Resources we created, and the columns are the shifts they work.

image

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9

Thats the epimagic I was looking for! I think I just tested this and it seems to work just as you said. Jobs that are already scheduled have already chosen resources, so they won’t change. But new jobs should pull the right resource based on the capability.

10

@NateS , the Employee record will create a Resource for the employee if you assign them a Resource Group. I started going down this path at my old job and we ran into hiccups with finite scheduling. Other than that, it worked great. We created the main Capability for the machine and added Additional Capabilities for the employees.

11

Does this prevent users from logging time outside their designated resource group? We wear lots of hats here.

12

No, anyone can still log into any job/operation as they are not a Location.

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