We are in the process of analyzing our scheduling settings & parameters. Currently, we have employees and machines set up as resources in our pre-production department (CNCtech RG, Machining RG, Press RG, Laser RG, Saw RG, etc… We are currently scheduling both the tech and the machine in this department. Our other departments just have employees set up as resources within their respective departmental resource group.
Today, employees are reporting labor against the “Tech” resource, but are not specifically selecting a tech, just selecting an activity to begin based on what machine they are running for the day. I started testing with AMM which led me down this rabbit hole of determining whether we are set up correctly or not. I’m starting to think that we should be reporting labor against the machine/location rather than the tech since the tech is not a “location resource” and we want to be able to track WIP movement with the in/out bins at the resource group level.
The techs are currently starting activities within the tech resource, but an employee is not necessarily dedicated to one machine so setting up in/out bins per tech resource would be near impossible and would cause confusion and inaccurate WIP inventory locations rather than helping. This is what led me to analyzing our current setup.
My main questions are:
What are others doing when they have both a machine and employee resource?
Are you scheduling both? How do you maintain capacity for both employees and machine resource?
Is reporting labor to the tech resource the correct way to go about this? If not, how does labor get applied when clocking in to the location? A lot of questions but I’m learning as I go so anything helps!
So the users should report to the machine rather than the tech. I’m assuming when the user clocks in, the labor is tied to their employee record rather than the tech resource?
We are finitely scheduling currently. We’ve been fine tuning production standards for about 6 months now and they don’t necessarily like the impact of the schedule being “real” now. Our team was asked a broad question of “How do we fit more into the schedule?” But based on our load, we’re sitting at full capacity. We’re finitely scheduling the tech and machine currently (just wanted to verify that was accurate), prod standards are dialed in, and starting to global schedule (thanks for the help with that).
This question may come full circle back to global scheduling, but if we wanted to drop something into the schedule where capacity is full, could we just adjust run global and it would do the rest? I really like the thought of that.
Agree with @jkane - we do the same with co-dependant resources on operations.
Yes
Technically yes, but it will also bounce things around based on all the rules. You can get a surprise or two.
You may also want to consider a built in buffer using either/both ‘move’ and ‘queue’ days for certain operations. We do this because we want to be able to take ‘expedite’ orders and make a bit more $$ on them.
Do you run what-if global scheduling? And if so, how does it work? Does it actually reschedule anything or does it just allow you to view what the schedule would look like on the job scheduling board?
You move things around on one of the Gannt charts (being careful to set the params correctly in the pop-up box) and then run the What-if Impact report to see what other jobs got affected and how. It’s not perfect but good. If you like it, then you save your changes, and it changes all the dates on the affected jobs.
honestly, we’re still tackling the what-if stuff completely manually because of constrained resources and materials. It’s just easier for the dept supervisor to make the call about fitting it in at this point.
The rates on the RGs are just estimates. When an employee logs into an Operation, the system takes their rate from the employee record for cost calculations.
There are multiple ways to play with the schedule. All of the boards allow you to move stuff around, and will “reschedule” anything you trump. It is not permanent, if you like the changes it made you can accept them.
What-if lets you see how new jobs would affect the current schedule. You can run a What-if and save the results under a description (never done this, just read it) so you can pull up different schedules. You can run the What-if for Global and for individual jobs.
One thing I am not sure if you mentioned yet, do you have Advanced Planning & Scheduling module. It is one of the best bang for your buck modules Epicor has.
We do not have the APS module. I pushed for it, but we ended up with AMM and advanced production instead. Advanced production has been pretty well worthless for us.
One other question I have is what causes the load graph to look like this? This happened after running global scheduling in test. It looks like this for all resource groups, huge spike on the day I ran global that goes way above capacity. In the resource scheduling board’s list view, I can’t find anything that would indicate this large of a number (462 actual hours with only 120 hrs of capacity)
