We have two identical SMT Machines in our shop. We can use either on for every job so in our ERP we set the work center as Pick and Place and then created a separate report to schedule jobs on each Machine. I am trying to figure out the best method for keeping the work center the same and allowing our scheduling person to manually schedule each pick and place line based on capacity. Any ideas or examples….this is our first scheduling system…
I think probably the simplest thing to do is to model one single work location for “Pick & Place”, but put enough capacity inside that work location for two machine’s worth of capacity, so that that amount of work can get scheduled into that single work location.
You might also play with setting the schedule mode to “parallel”. You might also consider playing with putting the “num workers” at that work location capacity as 2 instead of 1, so as to allow two parallel streams on the schedule.
The capacity settings can be set as defaults on the Admin >> Data Maintenance >> OrdlineStatus table. They can then be manipulated (override on a per day basis) in the Production >> Scheduling >> Set Capacity (Capacity Calendar).
I’d recommend playing with those capacity settings and schedule modes and testing the scheduling on test workorders until you settle into what you like when backward (or forward) scheduling a workorder.
The other option is having separate work locations for each machine and modeling each capacity discretely, putting one machine on the default labor plan sometimes and the other machine on a labor plan other times and swapping them on the “order specific labor plan” when needed, but this seems like more maintenance than is worth it.
If you’d like, you can also enable the “show_all_part_locations_workorder” config setting, so that when your users are statusing work orders and tracking time, they could see that the routing wants the workorder to go to work location “pick and place”, but they can actually track time to “machine 1” and/or "machine 2” (if you add those to the OrdlineStatus table).
One other consideration, if it’s your first time setting up a scheduling system, you might consider simply setting the pick and place work location to infinite capacity (set it at 9999999999) and just schedule labor demand into infinite capacity.
Hope this helps!