We are moving from a very old system “Made2Manage”, to EPICOR. I wanted to take this opportunity to bring some more visibility of our operations. In M2M, we only had 3 operations. I have painstakingly expanded that 3 into 9, hoping that we would be able to see clearly what stage of production the jobs are in. The problem I’m now facing is that the scheduling engine assigns the first operation to the correct area, but all following operations are sent to separate areas. We currently complete the entire job all in the same area. How can I prevent going back down to 3 operations, but still allow all of the operations to be completed n the same bay(resource group/resources)?
Welcome to the world of scheduling, hope you enjoy your stay, short answer? Can’t be done, longer answer, can’t be done well, it isn’t so much an Epicor shortcoming as it is an Automated Scheduling Issue
You need to look at Capabilities, Resources, Time, Transport Time, Setup, Start and Stop, Exceptions, What If’s, Only IF, and (my favorite) “because John said so”
Even narrowing down the number of operations back to 3 you can’t guarantee they will all be done on the same resource if said resources have the same capabilities.
I’m a tech guy not a operations guy there are plenty here smarter than me in that area, so I’ll let them throw suggestions out but from a pragmatic perspective and my years of battling this same battle from the tech side, it is just a nightmare.
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So once a single resource has been assigned for the first operation you want it to stay at that workcenter? Hmm that is a conundrum, I’m not sure how you would lock it to that resource in your resource group other than manually selecting it on the op dtl of the job once it’s where it’s going to live. Perhaps you could write a process that does that automagically takes the operations resource(s) and sets them by hand on the other op details?
We upfit trucks. Each build may have 10-15 options that must be installed. As things stand all options are done by the same tech, in the same bay.
Are you saying that i could write a BPMS to keep all operations in the same bay?
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Yes. if your resource group is say “Bays” and there are {bay1, bay2, bay3, etc} and as soon the resource for the first operation is assigned you could then set that as the specific resource on the rest of the operations. It isn’t the easiest BPM for sure but certainly not the worst either.
I do something like this at the resource group level because we could build anything anywhere. Our BOOs are generic with assembly center then on get details I assign the team of the job to all of the generic operations. Our resources are also generic Team 1 Member 1-x to making scheduling work.
If you did each Bay as a resource group. Assigned the bay and the scheduling blocks to 1 which sets the number of operators would assign the team member.