Module Description

The Operation Schedule Planning App allows you to manage production orders within each work center or production area.

Through the app it is possible to view the area load for each period and the remaining availability, manage processing and setup times manually or automatically according to rules established by the user.

In addition, it allows you to manage the sequence of orders and production times. By selecting the desired sequence, the app will calculate the start and end date and time of each order.

In this way, the app allows us to manage the entire planning of each work center and production area from a single page in Business Central.

Setup

Production Area Group Setup

Before using the app features, you can configure the setup times for the different production areas, so that the app can automatically calculate the different setup times according to the type of operation. To do this, select the light bulb in the top right and enter “Production area group setup”.

You must enter the production area group, the setup type (Here you will select for which type of setup the app will use this time. For example, if the tool does not change between production operations, enter “Same tool”), the time needed for this type of setup and finally, the time at which the setup can be performed.

This can be configured for all production area groups and all setup types used in the area. For this feature to work properly, the tools in the production cycles must be loaded in advance.

Tools Setup

This setup is done from the cycle, which can be found by searching for “Cycles” in the search bar at the top right and selecting the desired cycle from the list. Once inside the cycle, you can select the tool used for each phase by selecting the phase row, then the “Operations” button and finally “Tools”.

A screen will open where you can enter the tools used and the information relating to them: “Tool No.”, “Tool Category”, “Quantity for” and “Location Code”, the other fields will populate automatically:

Using the Operation Schedule Scheduling

Application Layout

To start using the ladder, you must select the light bulb at the top right and enter “Planning operations ladder”.

On this page there are three tabs on the screen. The first tab, “General”, will be where we will insert the production area or work center to manage and the display mode. In the example, work center 120 and a daily display were selected.

Once the work center is set up, a row for each day will appear under the “Load” tab. In this case, by changing the view in the “General” tab, you could choose to see a row for each week, month, quarter or year. For each row, the system will show the Capacity, Allocated Quantity, Available Quantity and the percentage of capacity used.

By selecting the “Allocated Qty” value you can find the production orders of the day and all the related information.

Finally, at the bottom of the page you will find the Filters tab, here you will see all the production orders present for the selected work center. There is also the possibility to filter these orders by Item, Variant and Production Order.

For all orders you will see the due date, cycle status, quantity to be produced, quantity already produced, capacity required, start and end times, and setup and processing times.

It is in this last tab where you can modify the following fields:

- Production sequence planning no.

- Cycle status

- Start date-time

- End date-time

- Setup time

- Processing time

- Simultaneous capacity

Example of usage

In this example we will change the setup and processing times for order xxxx and increase the simultaneous capacity of the work center from 1 to 2. With this latter setting, having double the capacity, it will take half the time to finish the job.

So from the following initial state:

We will set a sequence in the “Planning No.” column, change the setup and processing times, and change the concurrent capacity. Immediately after that, we will launch the “Chain operations” action, and in the page that opens, the parameters will be set:

• “From sequence no.”: The sequence number from which to start the recalculation.
• “A sequence number”: The final sequence number to recalculate. (Usually you want to set this to a large range to make sure that the sequence is recalculated for all operations.)
• “Start Date”: The date to begin production of the selected rows.
• “Start Time”: The time to start production.
• “Update type”: You will have to choose whether to recalculate the production times for all orders or only for those that have not been started.
• “Renumber sequences”: Checking this box will renumber the orders.
• “Initial sequence number”: If you flag the previous box, renumbering will start from the value entered in this field.

Once everything is set, select “OK”. The start and end times will be recalculated based on the changes we made to the sequence, timing, and concurrent capacity of each row.

Other features

The app also offers the ability to move operations from one Area or work center to another and change the status of an order. Both will be done by selecting the order line from the “Filters” tab and then selecting the action from the top menu.

To move an operation we should only select the row, then the action and finally the new work center.

To change the cycle status instead, after selecting the desired row we will select the “Change status” action and finally the new order status, in this example: “Closed”.