Production Calendar 5am to 2am Working Time?

Kinetic ERP
1

Good afternoon,
I am working on setting up production calendars in various places. Our shop runs nearly 24 hours a day. We consider our machines open for scheduling from 5am to 2am the next day. How do I represent that in a calendar? Do I check off all hours except for 3 and 4am?
Thanks!
Nate

2

You can do it that way. That’s how we’ve configured our resource calendars.

I vaguely recall others arguing that you should click 1-22 and leave 23 & 24 blank, but I don’t recall why. We’ve never had issues. Main thing is that we have proper capacity for booking orders and scheduling subcontracts. We don’t care about the exact start/stop times.

1 Like
3

There are two schools of thought here…

  1. marking as you described, showing the two “real” hours that you are not wanting things scheduled as open, then when you look at Dispatch reports, the suggested start time will be “real”. In other words, the it will suggest that you start work at midnight and work for several hours, then stop for 2 hours, then restart at 5:00 AM.
  2. BUT some companies don’t want to get that specific, and choose the first X hours they work. In this case, the dispatch report will always start at midnight, even if your team doesn’t arrive until 8:00 AM. Hour 0 is the first hour, etc…
    I actually prefer option 1, showing the real times you normally work.
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4

Thanks Tim and John! I am also leaning towards trying our best to show the “real” time to start each op. I printed a few empty calendars from a screenshot. I am hoping my floor managers can use these to tell me what times the various resource groups are available.

I am still curious how others do this. Anyone else have a different approach? Can anyone say why it might be beneficial to start at 1 and leave the last two hours blank, as @jtownsend suggested?
Thanks again!

5

@NateS, you’re clearly putting a lot of effort into getting scheduling working properly. For the production calendar setup, you may want to consider the information in the following KB article, but keep in mind that the functionality also may have changed since the article was created.

Scheduling Dates in resourcetimeused file are not consistent message stops Time Expense Login Logout (KB0071390)

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6

Thanks @ScottLepley! This is interesting! This makes it sound like we should check all 24 hours. Just in case someone works late or early.

Are there any downsides to making all hours available? I can see that it might try to schedule a job during a time when normally no one is working. I guess we would just have to spot those and fix them manually.

7

leaving some hours unchecked has nothing to do with when people can work. in other words… if you have a schedule that only has 8 hours, you can still work 16 hours. The calendar is used to define the schedule of the jobs… ie, if you only have 8 hours per day in the calendar, and you have a job that takes 24 hours, then the system will schedule it to take 3 days (assuming no other constraints). if you have a calendar with 24 hours, then the job will be scheduled to be finished in one day.

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8

Another point to consider is to only put 20 hours on the calendar.
By doing this shows your true capacity due to breaks, cleanup and general times of training etc.

With the priority dispatch report / work queue operators can select the next jop operation in the queue.