Capacity calendar

Ensure healthy management of your production line by using the capacity calendar.

In order to pace adequately your production, you must find your bottleneck workstation: this represents your slowest workstation through which all of your projects, without any exceptions, must pass through. While it may be at the beginning or at the end of your production line, it will be the one indicating your capacity: no matter the advance you are trying to take, in the end, you will never go faster than this workstation. By managing your production line based on it, you will then be able to avoid needlessly overloading your plant and your inventory which will help you to ensure better management of your spending versus your incomes (coming from finished products that are delivered and installed). Likewise, you will be able to easily spot downtimes that can become costly giving the fact that you still have to pay the overhead cost, or can be paying an employee doing nothing productive. Thus, healthy management of your capacity will then allow you to counter these situations either by making additional selling effort to fill the gap or take these as an opportunity to improve your production processes.

Simulation

The simulation is the tool used to plan your plant capacity. It will facilitate your planning through it’s daily, weekly and monthly view.

Under this window, you will be able to plan a new work-order, quickly change the due date of a planned project or completely unplan a work-order that was previously scheduled.

Planning a work-order

To plan a work-order, you have to select the ‘'Wo to plan'' tab. in order to display all of your upcoming projects. Note that it is also possible to filter the view by date or filter based on a specific project by entering the order number.

Once your work-orders are displayed, select one of them and click on ‘'Display times’'. The displayed time represents the sum of the production time linked to your bottleneck workstation from your product and materials belonging to that work-order.

To plan it in your calendar, drag and drop the time to the desired date. Note that if you plan a work-order on a date that doesn’t respect your purchasing delays, you will be notified by the system.

Click on the checkmark to save your new schedule.

Once planned, the due date will be automatically updated in the work-order.

Modify or unplan a work-order

Always in the simulation, you will be able to modify or completely unplan a work-order.

Select the ‘'WO in progress’' tab and click on ‘'Display’' in order to have the full list of your work-order that are already planned. To find a specific project, you can use the order number or search by work-order number, customer or title directly in the table.

Once you found your work-order in the list, find it easily in your calendar with the ‘'locate’'.

To unplan it, make a right-click on the coloured time stick in the calendar, then select ‘'unplan’'. It will then be removed from the schedule et will be added under the ‘'WO to plan’' tab.

To modify the planned date only, simply select the time stick and drag and drop it to the new desired date.

Once your changes are made, click on the checkmark to save them.

The due date will be automatically updated in the work-order.

Capacity calendar

While the capacity calendar helps you manage your production line, it is also an excellent tool allowing you to track the progression of your projects at a simple glance.

Just as it is in the simulation, the calendar allows you to have a daily, weekly and monthly view.

As for the table below the calendar, it will allow you to see which work-orders are scheduled, their advancement step as well as those missing materials necessary for production. With a simple click, you will also be able to open them in order to validate further information if needed.