Scheduling Blocks vs Crew Size

We have 3 groups of 2 welders. One tacking pieces together and passing it to the second for a complete weld.

Currently my shop has our resource group, with 6 resources, setup with 2 scheduling blocks and 1 crew size. This doesn’t appear correct to me. Shouldn’t it be 1 scheduling block on 3 resources and a crew size of 2?

I’m afraid by changing this we might end up with double costing and the schedule not coming out correctly as the capacity has shrunk…

Example: A 1 hour job is scheduled against 2 resources, causing the schedule to anticipate the job only taking 30 minutes with 1 hour of man, or resource, time cost. If I change it, it’s now on one resource for a whole hour, rather than 2 at 30 minutes, and that hour is now costing us twice as much.

I feel that by changing it to 1 block, 3 resources and a crew size of 2 would more accurately represent what is actually happening on the shop floor… but if I did that, would I have to change our burden and labor costing to keep estimated costs the same?

I do not know if this helps, but to do what you said we created a resource group that handled all three people. (for us) The rates on the resource group were tripled, just like you said (burden and labor costing) . Then created a log on for that group. (MES) That way only one person had to log in and out for the group and they could work on numerous orders without doing it for each person. So they log on once with there clock numbers then log on as the new employee—resource group.

Stephen Smalley

I’m not sure that would work for us. I’m trying to avoid raising costing as that will reflect in our current estimated costs, which are fine right now. However, your response gave me another idea on how to approach this. Similar to your setup but a little different.

Use 1 scheduling block, 1 resource, 1 crew size and set concurrent capacity to 3. That should keep our costing the same, make the schedule more accurately portray what’s happening on the shop floor and allow all 3 weld groups to see all jobs since any welder can weld any job. I’m going to test later this afternoon.

UPDATE 11/29/18

Appears to be working great so far!

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