Scheduling blocks or crew size

Epicor ERP 10
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1

I am working on the most appropriate way to set up my operations to do what I need. We have tried a number of different things, But I am still fuzzy on how a scheduling block will work for us or If i need to think about this differently. Basically, I really need to split 1 operation to 3 employees, in the same assembly station.

Scenario:
we build police cars - this is our finished good. Each job builds 1 vehicle. In this scenario, we never have 1 job building more that 1 of anything as it’s finished good.
To build it, it requires about 50 man hours of labor. It takes up 1 bay space during those hours.

I am currently planning on having an operation called “Police car assembly”. it would always be for 1 unit, that takes 50 hours to build. It would be assigned the Resource groups of “assembly bays” and “Assembly employees”.

“assembly bay” has resources of bay 1, 2, 3, 4. “assembly employees” has employees 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,10,11,12. So technically, we should be able to run 4 bays with 3 people each.

IF I understand scheduling blocks right, I feel it will assign the appropriate employees if I put the block at 3, BUT I feel it will also try to split into multiple bays, even though it is a single unit. am i wrong to think this? since it is a single finished good, will it just split the employees? How the heck does it know the difference between the employee and the bay?

Anyone have any insite on this or experience in a similar scenario? We have worked on using multiple operations on the same job, but the schedule is technically “moving” the vehicle from 1 bay to another, and it doesn’t seem to schedule anymore the 1 employee to each op.

Epicors example is always about an airplane manufacturer. it is almost the same thing. assemble the airplane with multiple people, but in the same space. How would you set up your Ops and group to accomplish this?

Thanks in advance!

2

I would create a couple of jobs in the test environment and try it both ways.

3

I’m no expert on this, however, we have a similar situation. We’re a packing company and will have between 1 and 11 packers working at a workcentre (I think this is what you’re calling a bay).

After trying to go down the path of each employee being a resource, we ended up creating an infinite resource just of ‘Employee’, which has Location unchecked and using Split Burden. On the operation specify the scheduling resource as this employee the number of employees in the Crew Sizes. One problem with this is that it relies on MES to do the burden split, so any timecard edits need to manually recalculate all the burden for the employees assigned.
In terms of how it knows the difference between the Bay and the Employee, the Bay will be a location, usually be the resource selected on the operation as the Labour reporting resource and the Crew Size when assigned to an operation will be 0.
We don’t use the scheduling blocks as we need to be able to define the number of resources required by operation, no resource group.

Hope this helps. There are probably others out there who can go through the in’s and out’s of this in more detail.

4

IF you have Advanced Planning and Scheduling module license, you can assign more than two resources to an operation. I believe this is what you want to do. Each Bay requires 4 operators, so add 4 of those “Assembly employees” resources, and one of those “assembly bays” resources to the ‘Police car assembly’ operation. Each job that has that operation will use 1+4 resources on the schedule.

Have you read the Technical Reference for Scheduling? (You can find it on EpicWeb)
Blocks = typically indicate a capacity multiplier. More blocks = more capacity.

And the Technical Reference for Job Costing… pg 231 in particular.
The Crew Size value is used for calculating labor estimates. This value defines the average number of shop employees at this resource group who work on this resource at the same time. You define two values for each resource group; one for Setup and the other for Production. The Setup Crew Size defines the number of people it physically takes to prepare for work at the resource/resource group. The Production Crew Size defines the number of people it physically takes to manufacture part quantities at the resource. The application uses this value as a multiplier to calculate the estimated labor cost for each operation. Do not, however, confuse crew size with resources per operation. The crew size value is a factor that increases your planned labor cost, as more people work on the job. You define the Crew Size modifier on resources and resource groups; however, you can also override this default value by entering different Crew Sizes on job, quote, and part methods. Use this to define estimated labor costs on a specific job record, quote, and/or method of manufacturing.

You may want to alter the Crew Size so that your labor estimates come out correctly.

5

Of Course I don’t have advanced planning. That sounds like exactly what I would need to make this work more appropriately. Any crazy ideas on workarounds?

I honestly (currently) don’t care if it schedules the bay correctly internally, but I do care that it uses all the employee resources available.

at this point, even if I have 12 resources within the employee group, wouldn’t it only ever try to schedule 4 due to the constraint of the bay? to be fair, It doesn’t actually seem like that is happening in our system because the dates seem fairly appropriate for all the existing jobs, BUT looking down into the resource groups it seems to only schedule a few employees ever. I am kind of wondering if i need to call the bay as a resource group at all, and instead only ever call the employee, with a schedule block of 3.

6

@recelect We do this generically with Teams and Team Members all infinite. You would have ABay1-4 Resource Groups then resources of ABay1TM01 thru ABay1TM03, etc. If you set scheduling blocks/crew members then schedule the job it will assign the team members to use what Epicor calls the squeeze factor for the operation. The production calendar for the resource group also plays into the math of how many hours per day the operation can run. hours of operation / crew / calendar hours = operation days

Since you have one operation you can assign the bay manually, but if you needed to it can be done with a bpm. We set all boms to ASMCTR or Assembly Center and then the team gets assigned on get details then based on the job hours I calculate the the scheduling blocks needed before scheduling.

1 Like
7

Caveat - we do not have multiple employees on an operation, so all of my answers are purely theoretical :slight_smile:

I think you could do it either way, but it comes down to mandatory vs variable.

I went with the assumption that every operations requires 1 bay + 3 employees. So therefore you have a fixed capacity across your 4 bays and 12 employees. To me, that would be the scenario where the operation is defined with those resources as ‘required’ or co-dependent (can’t schedule the op unless all the resources are available). Since you don’t have APS you can’t create that scenario, soooo…

I think blocks will work but testing is the key. Blocks will change how the system calculates overall capacity, so I’d watch the overload when 5 or more jobs are on the schedule (4 bays is max, but 5 or more may overlap the 50-hour minimum time if the capacity calculation is incorrect).