Thank you for the feedback. Your suggestions help me think about the topic from another angle.
When considering this issue, we must consider quantity, labor hours, machine hours, and scheduled time. For quantity, your suggestion of breaking the powder operation into 4 separate operations will solve that problem. The labor hours for each of the operations will be 4 hours and each person can enter quantity. If each of the new operations (hang, mask, spray, take off) takes 4 hours and they are scheduled start to finish then the scheduling engine will take 16 hours for this machine. We need the machine time or scheduled time to be 4 hours. I need the people to work at the same time. So I would have to set the Scheduling Factor to Start to Start. For the Powder Resource we have labor hrs = burden hrs. I think the burden should be multiplied by the the time it took the parts to move through the line (4 hours) but it is being multiplied by the total labor hours (16 hours). I could try to fix this issue by changing the burden rate.
I also am hesitant of this suggestion because our bill of material and method of manufacturing is already huge and adding 4 more operations to each Method of Manufacturing would be a time consuming task.
In addition, since the powder coat line is a continuous line, sometimes we have people help for 10 minutes (especially at take off) if the one operator gets backed up. We need a way for an extra person to clock on. So I still have to solve the quantity problem in MES for the extra person that clocks on every now and then to help when the line backs up. I am thinking about (in Pilot) setting the Labor Entry to Time - Backflush Qty and see how that affects the quantity issue. For right now we have the Take Off person enters quantity and everyone else must enter 0.
I am going to continue to run more tests in Pilot.
Thank you for the ideas,
Heide