We never used What If as we thought it was redundant.
But now with everything moving towards Lean Manufacturing, we explored the opportunity of only scheduling what was needed to be scheduled and What If everything else.
So we started to test and found it was not working (8.03.405)
I called it in about 2 months ago...at which point Epicor tested on their most current release (407). It is still broken. To Rob's point...the scheduling pieces of Vantage have always been half-a**ed working. We have been live for three years (8.00.7XXx - 8.03.405) and have never found every aspect of the standard scheduling functionality to work...
Thanks
Patty Buechler
But now with everything moving towards Lean Manufacturing, we explored the opportunity of only scheduling what was needed to be scheduled and What If everything else.
So we started to test and found it was not working (8.03.405)
I called it in about 2 months ago...at which point Epicor tested on their most current release (407). It is still broken. To Rob's point...the scheduling pieces of Vantage have always been half-a**ed working. We have been live for three years (8.00.7XXx - 8.03.405) and have never found every aspect of the standard scheduling functionality to work...
Thanks
Patty Buechler
--- In vantage@yahoogroups.com, Robert Brown <robertb_versa@...> wrote:
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> The global scheduler is/has been fundamentally broken (to varying degrees since 403 - and likely before) and isn't slated to be completely fixed until 408 under SCR59236.
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> I wouldn't take its output too seriously until it is actually working as intended (versus the pat "working as designed" answer support likes to numb our brains with until we refuse to go away).
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> In the end, it is only an approximation based upon an almost assuredly imperfect model of your true complex capacity constraints (that always include the human variability element) & your processes.
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> Start comparing you initial as-scheduled plans (since you aren't locking and those plans will change with each global run) to actual results and develop the gross level fudge factors your planner/schedulers will need to "know" to survive.
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> Are you adding jobs throughout the day to the global results? If so, and if someone is NOT explicitly finite scheduling them from job entry, you WILL show overloaded finite resources.
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> Initial infinite scheduling of jobs is not so terrible an idea in many environments (particular once your planner/schedulers know the 'fuge factors' and typical resource queue profiles). It is often more realistic to get a due date you know is too early - but ALLOW enough start to finish time (based on your 'fudge facttors) when manually planning multiple levels of jobs.
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> Initially finite scheduling (in a heavily loaded shop with lots of contention) results in extremely unrealistic far-future due jobs (more unrealistic than infinite done by an intelligent experience planner). The initla due dates for these jobs end up far in the future as a result of the constraining (heavily & tightly loaded by global) scheduling resource(s) in the job method and give you an an unrealistic excessively in-the-future due dates.
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> A nightly global run will reshuffle and level off the jobs (either way).
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> If you still have overloads - look to see if you have people clocking into OPs & starting Activity out of sequence from the dispatch. (Meaning, they are starting an OP not scheduled as due to start for several days - or even weeks.)
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> If you are company configured to NOT reschedule in-process OPs, this will effectively lock the schedules of these in-process OPs and can give you overload conditions when the degree of locked OPs scheduled on a resource reaches a critical mass. The global is simply presented with impossible constraining conditions and overloads (as well as unutilized gaps) can occur in resource schedules.
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> It is extremely important that you also run the job completion process or nagging open load will quickly start to build up from old (effectively) finished jobs that still may have some minor labor reporting problems (or aren't being adjusted by the Job Yield Recalc process to compensate for scrap losses at any OPs). These jobs will still consume little pieces of (locked) scheduled capacity blocks that can play havoc with the effectiveness of your finite scheduling.
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> That doesn't happen to be a Vantage issue - That is an issue with any finite scheduling system.
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> As to "what if" - We don't use it (as we found it useless for our process needs.) - Can't offer advice. I just know what you are viewing is a secondary Load table and not true schedule (until you accept a what if schedule and it is transferred to the live schedule tables). Most of the graphical scheduling tools actually use the Load tables (and not real schedules) so were found to be of little value to us.
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> Rob
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> --- On Tue, 3/31/09, tonia.blakely <tblakely@...> wrote:
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> From: tonia.blakely <tblakely@...>
> Subject: [Vantage] What-If Scheduling
> To: vantage@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 8:31 AM
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> We are currently running 407A and have converted from infinite to finite capacity on a majority of our resource groups. We ran the global schedule in What-If mode and noticed that the What-If appeared to have leveled out the loads. How do you accept the What-If schedule? I went into the Job Scheduling board then selected all open jobs and accepted all changes. Is that how you correctly accept a What-If?
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> If so, then...
> 1) How can the overload informer shows both Actual and What-If with different data even after I accepted the What-If.
> 2) How can the the Resource Scheduling board show an overloaded on a finite resource (on several days throughout the year) when none of the jobs are locked?
> 2) Why do you still see a What-If and Actual Load when viewing the Resource Schedule Load Graph?
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> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>