Authentise's newest scheduling capability combines your expert insights and your team's work schedule. Gather the insights of your planning and engineering team to accurately estimate the time required to perform each step in an item's Workflow. Pair this with our new Labor Schedules for each of your Workstation Types to yield a more accurate schedule, based on your focused reviews and set up against your actual working hours.
Here's how to get started!
Enter Labor Schedules for each Workstation Type
Each Printer and Post Processor Type in your Bureau will now allow you to specify a Labor Schedule for when your Bureau will have Labor-force available to execute operations on these types of Workstations. For each Workstation Type that you would like to use a Labor Schedule, you will specify the Working Days and the Working Hours on those days.
Refine Default Durations and describe Labor Requirements
To fully enable Labor-based scheduling, you will need to describe one more detail about your Workstation Type. The type of Labor required to perform the operation. We are debuting with two options: Continuous Labor and Labor to Start. Picking between these options is essential to obtain your desired scheduling behavior.
Continuous Labor - Workstations of this type are only able to proceed or process work while under constant involvement from a human. Examples that come to mind are any hand-worked operations such as Manual Support Removal or Sanding. If constant human oversight is required for work to occur at a workstation, Continuous Labor is probably the correct option.
If you choose Continuous Labor, our schedule will smear longer jobs across multiple working days. For example, if your facility runs a basic 9 am - 5 pm, Monday-Friday schedule and you have a Run that is expected to require 40 hours of Labor, it may be scheduled to start on Monday at 9 am and will be scheduled to conclude on Friday at 5 pm. The availability of a Labor resource (in addition to the Workstation Resource) becomes your limiting factor and we account for this when scheduling Workstations requiring Continuous Labor. If you choose Continuos Labor, you will not need to enter a Default Labor Duration.
Labor to Start - Workstations of this type require a human to kick them off their processing but may be able to function with little to no oversight. Simple examples of this would include Heat Treatment Ovens and Ultrasonic Cleaners. After entering the specifics of a treatment, the human operator is able to leave the Workstations unattended to process the parts with the potential for occasional check-ins for progress and to ensure there are no issues or errors to rectify. If your Workstation can run its operation without the need for constant human oversight/monitoring, Labor to Start may be your type of Labor.
If you choose Labor to Start, our schedule will try to get Runs started as long as there are minutes left in your workday! We expect that the most benefit for these types of Operations will be the opportunity to kick them off at the end of a workday to run overnight while your workforce is away so that a completed Run is able to be removed from a Machine at the start of your next workday. For example, if your facility runs a basic 9 am - 5 pm, Monday-Friday schedule and you have a Run that is expected to require 24 hours of Workstation Duration, it may be scheduled to start on Monday at 4:55 pm and will be scheduled to conclude on Tuesday at 4:55 pm.
With the type Labor to Start, you will need to specify the Default Labor Duration. It is assumed that this time would be accrued within the time that that Run is active at the Workstation. It may consist of 10 minutes of starting the Run at the Workstation and then periodic check-ins over the next 24 hours totaling 30 minutes of Labor for a Run that spent 24 hour's in a Workstation's machine.
Enabling Labor Enhanced Workflow and selecting the Labor Type
Check the box and select the appropriate radio button for the Type of Labor that is required. If you choose Labor to Start, be sure to specify a reasonable Default Labor Duration!
Estimating Work Times for each Line Item
The other end of this process will involve capturing your expert opinions about how long an operation will take for a given Part. We have now provided a method to input this at for each step in a Line Item's Workflow.
Setting up your Order
Create an Order and add the necessary Line Items to fill that Order. Specify that the Order requires a Quote by checking the Order Quote Required checkbox. After assigning a Workflow for each Line Item, you will be able to drill into those Workflow steps to record the expected Labor and Workstation Time required to produce that Part on a Per Piece basis.
Entering Estimated Workflow Step Timings
Scroll to each Line Item in your Order and look for the green Quote Preview box. Here you will be able to edit the timings for each step for both Labor and Workstation times. Remember that these times are on a Per Piece basis! If you keep the "Use time estimates when scheduling" checkbox checked, we will do just that!
From this point forward, go ahead and confirm and schedule the pieces as usual. We will handle the scheduling based on all of the inputs you've put in up to this point.
How we put the two together!
This is where the rubber hits the road! Confirm your fully time-estimated Line Item and Create a run containing pieces from the Line Item.
Now our scheduling system will combine some math with the rules that you've specified for your Workstation Types to yield a schedule considering both your time estimates, the contents of your Run(s), and the Labor Schedule's constraints on when Labor will be available to work on your Pieces. We'll first determine the Workstation Duration for a Run, next we'll consider its Labor Needs which may result in a scheduled time exceeding that Workstation Duration.
We'll describe some cases you might see to help clarify the logic we use when creating your schedule.
Determining Run Durations when Scheduling
A) No Pieces in a Run have Manual Workflow Step Time
This is the pre-existing behavior. This is our default scheduling behavior which assumes that any Run created on a given Type of Workstation will require approximately the same amount of time regardless of the number of Pieces in the Run (this value is the Workstation's Default Workstation Duration).
The Workstation's Default Workstation Duration will be the Total Duration of the Run regardless of the number of Pieces in the Run. If there are 20 Pieces and the Workstation's Default Workstation Duration is 1 hour, the Run's Workstation Time will be 1 Hour.
B) All Pieces in a Run have Manual Workflow Step Times
This is a new possibility. The Sum of each of the Manual Workflow step Times will be the Total duration of the Run. If there are 20 Pieces, 10 have a Workflow Step time of 30 Minutes and 10 have a Workflow Step time of 1 Hour, the Run's Workstation Time will be 15 Hours (10*(30 minutes) + 10*(1 Hour)).
C) Some Pieces in a Run have Manual Workflow Step Times and some rely on Workstation Default Times
This is a new, mixed case. We expect this may be one of the stressing points for this system if actual use results in frequent mixing of Manually estimated and Defaulted Times. In this case, the Sum of each of the Manual Workflow step times will be added to a proportion of the Default Duration for that Workstation Type. Understanding this proportion of the Default Duration is an important concept that we will explain now.
A Piece's estimated duration is based on a proportion of the Default Duration
The Workstation Default Duration will be divided by the total quantity of Pieces in their originating Line Item to approximate the Per-Piece Default Duration. This estimated Per-Piece Default Duration is used for calculating the mixed case's Total Duration. For a given originating Line Item with a Quantity of 20 pieces and whose Workflow contains a Workstation with a Default Duration of 5 hours. The estimated Per-Piece Default Duration for this Line Item/Workstation combo would be 15 minutes per piece (5 Hours / 20 Pieces = 15 Minutes per piece). This value will only be used in the mixed case.
If there are 20 Pieces, 10 have a Workflow Step time of 30 Minutes and 10 do not have a manual Workflow Step time (for this step the Workstation's Default Duration is 5 hours and the originating Line Item has a quantity of 20). The Run's Workstation Time will include 5 Hours for the first 10 pieces and another 2.5 hours for the second 10 Pieces (each piece has a 15-minute estimated Per-Piece Default Duration (5 hours / 20 Pieces = 15 minutes)). The Run's Total Duration will be 7.5 hours (10*(30 Minutes)+10*(15 Minutes)).
Determining Calendar time, based on Labor Constraints
A) Workstation Duration: 20 hours
Work schedule is enabled with a 9-5, Monday-Friday schedule
Labor enabled and set to Continuous Labor
It's Monday at 9am
A run will be scheduled to start on Monday at 9am and finish on Wednesday at 1pm (2.5 shifts). Calendar time exceeds the Workstation Duration.
B) Workstation Duration: 20 hours
Work schedule enabled with a 9-5, Monday-Friday schedule
Labor enabled and set to Labor to Start
Default Labor Duration is 1 hour
It's Monday at 9am
A run will be scheduled to start on Monday 9am and finish on Tuesday at 5am (outside of working hours). The labor constraint only ensures that the start time is during working hours. Calendar Time matches the Workstation Duration.
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