Hi all! Time for me to expose my scheduling ignorance once again!
As some of you know by now, we have been working towards a scheduling system. We have our jobs scheduled based on the req date from the sales order release. Some of those jobs are scheduled way out in 2023. While we are slow, we want to pull some of that work forward to keep our guys busy.
I don’t know the right way to do this. So, I added a UD field to JobHead and called it SalesShipByDate. This way I can leave my jobs ReqBy Date alone. This represents the date the customer needs the parts by. Next, I schedule the job using backwards scheduling from the new SalesShip By date. This pulls all the work up to the current timeframe. I have to lock the job so my daily global rescheduling task doesn’t move it back to 2023.
Now this works. I can see my previously future load is now current load. But I can’t help but feeling like I am reinventing the wheel here. Shouldn’t I be using WhatIf for this somehow? We don’t use whatif at all right now.
We need to be able to run the Shop Load summary report or something similar to show the load on the shop before I pull jobs forward, and the load on the shop after I pull the jobs forward. Ideally, we would be able to identify a list of jobs to pull forward, and then review the impact to the load before we actually reschedule the jobs. In this way we should be able to review several iterations of pulling various jobs forward to see the impact on schedule.
Please, tell me I am doing it wrong, and there is an easier way.
Giving thanks to all those that offer so much expertise!
Nate
Hi Nate, did you consider forward scheduling for this jobs you want to pull forward? you can assign another scheduling code to this job so the global scheduling process also uses forward scheduling on the job.
Regards, Michel
We don’t need to forward schedule. We still want the job to be done by the target date (sales ship by date). My understanding is that we use forward scheduling if we have to start a job right away and then we can see how long it will take.
The end goal is to show the manager a list of jobs that are due in the future, then let him decide which jobs to pull in and reschedule with a sooner shipping date. But we want to try a few different options. Maybe three different lists of jobs that we could pull in to fill up our load. We want to look at each option and decide which is the best based on the load, where it gets placed, and the value attached to the jobs (well to the orders, damn terminology.)
Your solution seems perfectly fine. By never changing the order ReqBy date, you are in line with the best practices of lean manufacturing: never lose focus of the customer base requirements.
As @mfranssen1 said, forward scheduling would be a good answer too. Whatever fit your business.
The WhatIf is just a nice feature to do some actions on and see how it looks. And if it looks good transfer it over. You can also do side by side comparison. Nothing complicated about it. it’s basically just another area you can schedule in, and then decide what to do.