I’m trying to solve some Scheduling issues, basically about the Setup. Let’s see if they can guide me, because I can’t find standard settings that can help.
SETUP IN MANUFACTURING
We have certain machines, all of which we have identified in Resource and Resource Groups, that have certain special characteristics with reference to the setup of each machine. The setup depends on more than one “tool”. For example, they have presses that depend on a tool and on a base for that tool.
Here the problems to be solved are:
The schedule should contemplate that the Jobs are ordered according to the combination of Tool + Base. That is, the Jobs should be scheduled in Tool+Base order, to minimize the Setup time. If we configure the tools and base as Resource Group and Resources, and add them to the MOMs, each Job has its own setup time, and does not minimize them. We intend that the setup time of the N Jobs of the same part (or parts with same setup), is “consumed” in the first job and the rest no longer contemplates setup times. We’ve tried Setup Group, but it only seems to be informative.
The second complex point is that for certain machines, the key point is the Base, where Jobs that use the same Tool + Base could be programmed continuously, but then a job with a Tool + the same base of the previous job(s) should not be programmed. This is because the setup time to place a new tool on the same base is important, so the correct thing to do would be to remove the old base, place the new base + tool, and while it is being manufactured, prepare the old base with the new tool.
While it will schedule the Resources together, it will not order them based on that - it will order them based on the Scheduling Order - which is another background process that should be running prior to the Scheduling process.
However, the Scheduling Order can be manipulated basically creating what you need. You could build an updateable dashboard that sorts based on your criteria and set the scheduling order based on SQL RowNum() in order to get the scheduler to ‘batch’ based on your Sort criteria.
Just an idea.
While the ‘batching’ works for materials, I don’t recall it working for resources.
We have a similar problem. In short, batching for us can be done either by the input material, or by a particular specification about the product being made (we are MTO/ETO and use the configurator, so one of its values) because the machines are set up for that particular variation. If more than one job exists within a 30-day window that has the same specification AND material input, the scheduler should batch them. Right now - we manually batch them in the Planner’s office - on paper.
We’ve not found and easy way to batch based on that specification AND account for setup time correctly. We decided that setup would NOT be on one job and ignored it on subsequent jobs - but decided that each job should contribute to and share in the overall cost of setup - so how would we split it up on the jobs after the fact? One way would be to make job adjustments before closing the job. If you could indicate on the job traveler which jobs were manually batched, you could calculate it.
Or it could be a combination of clocking hours (via MES) to each job but have the setup time ‘standard’ set to some minor fixed value of like 1/2 hour. That would create a buffer in each job with minimal variance when we clock actual setup time chunks on each job.
this tidbit begs the question - Does this parallel preparation work incur additional labor cost? If it does, then it’s “setup” time and should be accounted for in the Job’s hours (and COGM).