I think I am misunderstanding the load leveling feature in the resource scheduling board. Based on my naive understanding and the words “Load Level” I assumed this would attempt to look at our capacity, then push jobs (operations) out past the overload condition so that the resource was no longer over loaded.
That does not appear to be what this does. Instead it looks like it wants to pull all the operations and do them all at the same time (compressed instead of leveled).
In this example, I load-leveled a small portion of the 4A resource groups operations. If anything, this seems like it is UN-leveling our load.
How is load leveling actually leveling any load?
Is there a tool that does do actual load leveling where the overloaded operations are pushed out past the overload condition of that resource group?
Those are a bunch of jobs all assigned to the 4A resource group. There are about a dozen mills(resources) in the resource group. Yes, we run infinite capacity.
Think about this for a second. If you are telling the system that you have infinite capacity, why would the system spread out your load?
If you don’t have a constraint set, there’s nothing to tell the system “I can only do x amount at a time”. Infinite means “I can do all of it at once”.
My load was leveled before I clicked load level, then it compressed it all. I guess they were naturally spread out due to the way we schedule jobs. Then the load leveling compressed it all because we have no finite resources.
If I turn on finite resources, then try load leveling will I be able to see what-if leveled load? Or do I need to run any additional processes?
Scheduling is quite complicated. So it’s not a quick fix. Yeah, you’ll have to have something constraining the scheduling. I’m not an expert (or even close to one), and just about every time I hear about someone trying to have epicor automagically schedule something, they end up giving up because it’s too hard to be realistic.
Ultimately, there are 2 constraints. 1 is equipment, and the other is manpower. You have to take both of them into account, and epicor can really only do one at a time. So unless you are a shop where one person only ever works at one resource, the logic usually breaks down along the way.
So, if there is no scheduling order, then it kind of makes sense that everything is being pushed to the same time since you are infinite. There is no way for the system to know which ones should come first, so it puts them all in the same place. I would try running that process and then see what happens.
