Nesting Jobs - FMS

We are currently running E9 and are having trouble discerning the efficiency for our group of 5 Makino A71 machines (FMS). Each machine can run 2-3 jobs at one time; the job that has the higher Parts per Hour Production Standard will show an unfavorable production variance and the job with the lower Parts per Hour Production Standard will show an favorable production variance. This also makes it very difficult to achieve an accurate schedule for these machines.

We were hoping that another company that is utilizing Epicor for their ERP software might also have these types of machines. If so, would you be willing to share how you pull efficiency data, as well as how you accurately schedule the machine(s)?

Thanks in advance.
Dave Miller

Dave - This would be similar to shops having a machinist running multiple jobs (on different machines) at once. At my past employer, one job would be the primary that the machinist would make the standard, and the other job(s) would be secondary, not making rate, but overall employee efficiency would be above 100%.

Thinking out loud:

  • I’m not sure I’d recommend it, but you could adjust the standards to reflect reality… What’s your costing method?
  • Or add a UD field on the jobs so you know it was run with Job##### and that was rate-limiting your production…
  • Or add some logic to your variance reporting to see what machine it was run on, find the other jobs running at the same time, and add a comment to the report “Rate limited due to Job#### at XXX pcs / hr”