Production activity control subsystem

OVERVIEW:
What's Going On the Shop?

Control production activity... for maximum shop floor productivity.
Controlling production activity on your shop floor is essential to your company's productivity. Better scheduling, dispatching, and tracking of your work orders through the shop can improve that productivity dramatically.

The MFG Production Activity Control subsystem helps you to handle the details of work order flow. It helps you manage the tracking of shop processes in numerous ways; by monitoring work order movement and managing work center priorities; by measuring work center loads and productivity; by recording scrap, shrinkage and down time; and by offering you a choice of scheduling techniques. You can schedule work orders forwards or backwards, with either finite or infinite capacity options, and when schedules are completed, you can request a dispatch list to track work order and work center status.

Production activity control gives you the tools you need to manage work order flow through your shop.

Control work order flow for coordinated shop scheduling.
Controlling Production Activity on your shop floor is essential to your company's productivity. Better planning, scheduling, dispatching, and tracking of your work orders through the shop can improve that productivity. The Production Activity Control subsystem can help you manage the progress of each work order through the shop by providing the tools you need to conveniently handle the details of work order flow.

Process information for accurate work order scheduling.
The Production Activity Control subsystem helps you manage the tracking of the shop process. First, the Production Activity Control subsystem facilitates the assignment of standard routings. Normally, this standard process will be appropriate and will require no special planning effort. Occasionally, you may need to use an alternate operation path to redistribute capacity loads, break a potential production bottleneck, or meet a special customer requirement. With the Production Activity Control subsystem, you can use simple transactions to assign alternate operations or alternate routings.

You also need to manage the cycle time for each step in your production process in order to plan and control your shop operations more effectively. The Production Activity Control subsystem stores four time elements: queue time, setup time, run time, and move time element for each work order based on its quantity.

Available scheduling techniques.
The system allows either infinite scheduling or finite scheduling (sometimes called infinite loading or finite loading), and within these two types of scheduling, operations can either be backward or forward scheduled.

Infinite scheduling assume unlimited capacity is available at the beginning of a schedule. Therefore, it ignores a work center's previously committed capacity. Infinite scheduling does not consider any previous load on the work centers from already scheduled work orders.

Finite scheduling, in contrast, considers the previous load and assumes that capacity is limited according to previous commitments. Other than this difference, finite scheduling works basically the same way that infinite scheduling works:

• Backward or forward scheduling of operations is allowed.
• The system moves backward or forward Through the work order's operations using the queue, setup, run, and move times to determine each operation's start and finish date.

However, during the finite scheduling process, a work center's previously committed capacity will not be considered available to consume.

Backward scheduling establishes a schedule backward from an estimated completion date to an appropriate start date. When a work order is backward scheduled, a completion date must be specified. Using this date, the system then works backward through the work order's operations and uses the queue, setup, run, and move times to determine the date each operation should begin. During this process, the system takes into account the working hours per day at each work center.

Forward scheduling establishes a schedule from an estimated start date toward an appropriate completion date. To forward schedule a work order, a start date must be specified. Using this date, the system then works forward through the work order's operations and uses the queue, setup, run, and move times to determine the finish date.

Dispatch list.
Once all the operations are scheduled and the material has been picked and delivered to the work center, you can print a dispatch list to keep track of work order and work center status. A dispatch list (or query) displays by work center all work orders with operations scheduled for that work center in the following order:

• All work orders, completed but not yet moved to another work center.
• All active (started) work orders (in-process and in-setup).
• All work orders which are ready to start (in queue and coming).

All work orders on hold.

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MANUFACTURING

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