Scheduling employees as resources

Yahoo Archive
1
Carey,

It is a crime Epicor doesn't give you or your company benefit for your willingness to share your superior knowledge of the topic.

You just explained the use of capabilties in a few paragraphs MUCH more effectively than any Epicor employee has managed to do (at a cost of days of consulting fees).

Thank you.

I still contend that for the resulting quality of schedules (the worst I've experienced in 25 years in fact), the Epicor modeling paradigm is grossly & needlessly complex.

Capabilities (based upon your excellent explanation) certainly do provide a means for more accurately modeling actual scheduled processes.

I still contend however that doing so increases the long term non-value-added maintenance cost of maintaining a model that, in every other system I've had experience with, is achieved just as well (or better) with far less complexity.

It truly seems to be a case where programmers (with no real world manufacturing experience) went wild trying to build a better mouse trap that simply was not needed.

Thank you though (and good luck getting over that sinus infection).

Rob Brown







Carey S <rotary1@...> wrote:
You will undoubtedly hear many opinions about this. The confusion is very justified.
There are fundamental principles and considerations here, and as expressed in a post by Robert, you will notice that there is no readily-available resource at Epicor that will be abe to quickly give you much advise here.

There are a couple of points to consider beyond what is already mentioned.
First, at Perspectives, you will hear course instructors mention to you that you SHOULD NOT schedule people as resources. This is a huge burden if you have any labor turnover, as this precludes you from using named labor, and instead "expert 1", "expert 2", etc.

I struggled for a long time with this consideration, and then I decided to explore "floating" human labor. This opened up a whole new world of understanding.
Robert mentions Capability in another thread, and although mentioned throughout the help files, there is nothing useful there or in any of the Epicor documentation that I have seen.

In order to use capabilities, you would need APS. I have spoken to many people who have purchased this license based on conversations they have had with me.
So, while I do not profess to be a manufacturing expert, Epicor has seen fit to use me as a reference.

Effectively, you can use capability to get around the one-to-one relationship between resources and resource groups.

Here is the basic example from Epicor:

Imagine you have 2 resources:
1) basic machining (3 axis requirement)
2) advanced machining (4 axis requirement)

I could set up 2 capabilities (effectively skill sets)
A) simple machining
b) Complex machining

I could set up the members of this capability as follows :
Cap A = 3 axis machine, AND 4 axis machine
Cap B = 4 axis machine (ONLY)

And this is a simple illustration of the one-to-many expansion.

But this is only basic. Suffice it to say, you now set your scheduling requirements based on capability, not resource or group.
You can assign schedules, vacations (and maint) by the group, or the specific resource...is cool now because I can schedule the exceptions for employee vacations.

But going a step further, I can then set load priorities on each resource with the capability. Therefore, in the labor capability of "Quality Inspection", I could choose to load the resources in the order of "Person 2, Person 3, Person 1.
This leaves my most cross-trained person available should he be needed elsewhere, but still available for any of the required operations.

Going a step further, I can qualify the operation standards based on he specific resource who actually does the labor.
For example, referring to the same labor capability, I would set up the operation and the standard for Person 2 to "1". This tells the system that with an op standard of x piece per hour, the percentage of the standard expected to be needed by Person 2 is 100-percent. I could then define the capability spec for person 3 to be ".8" which would tell the system to expect 80-percent the output of the standard (this resource works more slowly, or whatever....


Anyway, you can see that APS and capabilities are really quite powerful.
I have talked to so many people who would have been better off to start with APS had they known the true benefits...unfortunately not effectively explained by Epicor to the disservice of themselves as well as their customers.

The addition of APS gives you not only the listed benefit, but removes the 2 exception limit on operations of standard Vantange/Vista production.

Note that this does not answer questions about whether this is something you should do in your particular situation, but there is validity in your question.

I do not make it a habit of publicizing all of this information as I find it unfair to provide Epicor the benefit when corporately, they have not given my company other considerations ( I do not get free documentation), but will be happy to answer any direct questions anyone might have.

Meanwhile, it is midnight here and I am suffering with a Sinus infection, so undoubtedly, my hands have missed typiing something my head might not realize, so I apologize in advance if that is the case.

Carey

To: vantage@yahoogroups.comFrom: nimish_bhatia1@...: Fri, 21 Dec 2007 05:20:32 +0000Subject: [Vantage] Scheduling employees as resources

We are a machining and fabrication shop doing mostly made to order (orengineered to order) parts with approx 250 employees. We currentlyfeel that we have too many employees for the amount of work beingdone. One of the main reasons we want vantage is to see whichemployees are working on what jobs so we can understand ourproductivity better.In order to see the productivity, I would assume we need to create allemployees as individual resources and choose the appropriate resourcewhile scheduling a job. However, since I'm new to vantage, I'm notsure of the advantages and disadvantages of using this system. Itobviously adds more detail during the scheduling phase, but I'm notsure if there are other pros and cons that I can't think of. In fact,I'm not sure if this is too much detail for scheduling that we willnot be able to maintain in the long run.Can someone help me understand whether to go this route or not? Ifnot, what other ways are there to better see which employee is
workingon which job so we can understand the productivity of employees on theshop floor.Thanks.

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2
We are a machining and fabrication shop doing mostly made to order (or
engineered to order) parts with approx 250 employees. We currently
feel that we have too many employees for the amount of work being
done. One of the main reasons we want vantage is to see which
employees are working on what jobs so we can understand our
productivity better.

In order to see the productivity, I would assume we need to create all
employees as individual resources and choose the appropriate resource
while scheduling a job. However, since I'm new to vantage, I'm not
sure of the advantages and disadvantages of using this system. It
obviously adds more detail during the scheduling phase, but I'm not
sure if there are other pros and cons that I can't think of. In fact,
I'm not sure if this is too much detail for scheduling that we will
not be able to maintain in the long run.

Can someone help me understand whether to go this route or not? If
not, what other ways are there to better see which employee is working
on which job so we can understand the productivity of employees on the
shop floor.

Thanks.
3
98% of our business is made to order too. What you are talking about
is three measurements: Job, Resource, People.

The job measurement is the Production Detail Report. But the other
two measurements really do rely on how you setup your system.

I would not setup all of your employees as resources. If the work is
being done on a machine, then the resource is a machine. If the work
is hand labor, then the resource is handwork/labor. If you have
different skillsets that are at different labor rates, then I would
setup one resource for each variation.

There is a flag on the Resource Group that is extemely important.
Labor = Burden or Split Burden. We have all machine resources setup
as split burden as there maybe more than one operator clocked into
the job/asm/opr. All handwork resources are labor = burden as many
times there is only one person performing the handwork. But you can
add more crew to the operation within the job to account for multiple
people doing the same operation (handwork) at the same time.

As far as measuring productivitiy...there are a couple canned reports
that you can use: Resource Group/Resource Efficiency & Employee
Efficiency. However, we have taken the canned reports and modified
them based on our measurements. I would strongly recommend opening
both and hitting F1 from the Report Selection screen. They did a
good job explaining how the calculations work.

One more tidbit...Earned Hours is a very important calculation used
in Employee Efficiency. Above and beyond the canned reports, if you
setup resources as described above, you should be able to slice and
dice the data for evaluting employees that ran the same type of jobs.

Thanks
Patty Buechler
UV Color, Inc.

--- In vantage@yahoogroups.com, "nimish_bhatia1" <nimish_bhatia1@...>
wrote:
>
> We are a machining and fabrication shop doing mostly made to order
(or
> engineered to order) parts with approx 250 employees. We currently
> feel that we have too many employees for the amount of work being
> done. One of the main reasons we want vantage is to see which
> employees are working on what jobs so we can understand our
> productivity better.
>
> In order to see the productivity, I would assume we need to create
all
> employees as individual resources and choose the appropriate
resource
> while scheduling a job. However, since I'm new to vantage, I'm not
> sure of the advantages and disadvantages of using this system. It
> obviously adds more detail during the scheduling phase, but I'm not
> sure if there are other pros and cons that I can't think of. In
fact,
> I'm not sure if this is too much detail for scheduling that we will
> not be able to maintain in the long run.
>
> Can someone help me understand whether to go this route or not? If
> not, what other ways are there to better see which employee is
working
> on which job so we can understand the productivity of employees on
the
> shop floor.
>
> Thanks.
>
4
> Can someone help me understand whether to go this route or not? If
> not, what other ways are there to better see which employee is working
> on which job so we can understand the productivity of employees on the
> shop floor.

I would first make sure you define what "productive" means to you. Often
times, people mix being productive with being efficient and they may not be
the same. I can't tell you have many employees and managers would work on
parts that were not needed but did so to raise their efficiency ratings. Ugh.

Be careful what you measure because that's what you're going to get. If you
haven't already, I would recommend reading Goldratt's "The Goal"
(http://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884270610) before
implementing any measurement system.

As a configure/make-to-order shop ourselves, there is but one goal: get a
quality product to the customer when they want it. If we follow that rule,
almost every other measure is bull$hit. If a product is not done correctly or
is late, that's when we chase down the reasons and try to make
process/personnel changes.

Also, make sure there's an equivalent measurement for sales and supervision as
well. Believe it or not, sometimes the shop is inefficient or non-productive
because of management too. <tongue position="firmly in cheek" />

Mark W.
5
I think you are contemplating a path that will result in nightmarish long term maintenance workload (setting up 250 employees as individual resources) for little gain (and, in fact, quite detrimental impacts on schedule quality - and costing - if you DON'T accurately resource model each employee's skill set, maintain individual calendars defining their daily 'capacity', etc.,).

My suggestion is to utilize activity reporting records to assess individual utilization (did you schedule them a full day's workload?) & productivity (how did their actual production rate compare to the MoM defined expected standard?) quality.

Unless you can realistically whittle down your 250 employees' pertinent skills to fit in a much smaller (valid) set of resource groups of truly common skills, you are also going to make your Standard Operation maintenance (and, by inference MoM maintenance) equally nightmarish. From a maintenance perspective, it is always desireable to specify required (and perhaps multiple - reflecting equipment, people skill sets and perhaps even specialized tooling) resource groups in Standard OPs (rather than individual resources).

You would likely be much better off utilizing the (frankly, already overly complex when the results are considered) 'dimensions' which the Vantage paradigm is based upon.

These 'dimensions' (my term) are:


Employees: Create an entry for everyone who will truly be doing activity reporting.
Departments: (Employees are assigned to departments. Ties to specific G/L accounts.)
Shifts: (Employees are default assigned to their typical shift - but can clock in to other shifts if they temporarily change shifts.)
Resource Groups: (Reflecting:

equipment
specialized tooling/fixturing with finite availability
people (skill sets - setup and run defined seperately if necessary)
subcontract outside services
anything else critical to your process

with equivalent-enough - but not necessarily exactly identical - capabilities.)

5. Resources: (Reflecting the specific machines, people, tooling, subcontract services, etc., under each Resource Group).

6. Calendars: (As many as you need to accurately reflect capacity of each Resource Group and Resource. If you choose decide to model each employee as a Resource, you will need 250 calendars to reflect their 'capacity' impacted by varying vacation schedules and typical work day hours.)

7. WIP warehouse/bins: (Primarily cost bucket entities but also representitive of physical locations/operation layouts so that materials backflush from correct storage points and material movement needs can be appropriately triggered - If you have AMM.)

8. Standard Operations: (Refers to required resource groups or resources - and necessary to be referred to when creating a MoM Op Detail.)

There are also (fortunately optional) Capabilities and operation standard production (rates) that you can drive yourself crazy with. (I've yet to have an Epicor consultant cogently explain the function and benefits of Capabilities while keeping a straight face...)

Resources/resource-groups all reference calendars and departments. Employees are tied to departments and shifts. Departments tie to the G/L.

...I'm not even going to begin to describe subcontract resource group/resource, standard operation relationships to vendor & part data.

The necessary to establish-and-maintain circular relationships between all these 'dimensions' intended to model your processes are big enough to drive 10 trucks through. (The designer of this absolutely needlessly complex paradigm ought to be 'doomed to programmers' purgatory' for an eternity of maintaining a model of a real world manufacturer.)

My suggestion is to only make it as complex as is necessary to sufficiently model your operation (re: good enough cost & scheduling accuracy).

Accurate enough cost accumulation is easy enough to achieve - but the scheduler (single order and global) is probably the weakest I've seen in 20 years... It is just not worth the complexity so Keep It Simple if you can.

Rob Brown




nimish_bhatia1 <nimish_bhatia1@...> wrote:
We are a machining and fabrication shop doing mostly made to order (or
engineered to order) parts with approx 250 employees. We currently
feel that we have too many employees for the amount of work being
done. One of the main reasons we want vantage is to see which
employees are working on what jobs so we can understand our
productivity better.

In order to see the productivity, I would assume we need to create all
employees as individual resources and choose the appropriate resource
while scheduling a job. However, since I'm new to vantage, I'm not
sure of the advantages and disadvantages of using this system. It
obviously adds more detail during the scheduling phase, but I'm not
sure if there are other pros and cons that I can't think of. In fact,
I'm not sure if this is too much detail for scheduling that we will
not be able to maintain in the long run.

Can someone help me understand whether to go this route or not? If
not, what other ways are there to better see which employee is working
on which job so we can understand the productivity of employees on the
shop floor.

Thanks.





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6
Bravo Mark. You hit the nail on the head.

The only value is delivering a quality product, on-time and at an acceptable price to the customer. The succesful manufacturer does that (and does it profitably by eliminating non-value-added waste - which in turn results in true value to investors/ownership).

Mark Wonsil <mark_wonsil@...> wrote:
> Can someone help me understand whether to go this route or not? If
> not, what other ways are there to better see which employee is working
> on which job so we can understand the productivity of employees on the
> shop floor.

I would first make sure you define what "productive" means to you. Often
times, people mix being productive with being efficient and they may not be
the same. I can't tell you have many employees and managers would work on
parts that were not needed but did so to raise their efficiency ratings. Ugh.

Be careful what you measure because that's what you're going to get. If you
haven't already, I would recommend reading Goldratt's "The Goal"
(http://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884270610) before
implementing any measurement system.

As a configure/make-to-order shop ourselves, there is but one goal: get a
quality product to the customer when they want it. If we follow that rule,
almost every other measure is bull$hit. If a product is not done correctly or
is late, that's when we chase down the reasons and try to make
process/personnel changes.

Also, make sure there's an equivalent measurement for sales and supervision as
well. Believe it or not, sometimes the shop is inefficient or non-productive
because of management too. <tongue position="firmly in cheek" />

Mark W.






---------------------------------
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
7
You will undoubtedly hear many opinions about this. The confusion is very justified.
There are fundamental principles and considerations here, and as expressed in a post by Robert, you will notice that there is no readily-available resource at Epicor that will be abe to quickly give you much advise here.

There are a couple of points to consider beyond what is already mentioned.
First, at Perspectives, you will hear course instructors mention to you that you SHOULD NOT schedule people as resources. This is a huge burden if you have any labor turnover, as this precludes you from using named labor, and instead "expert 1", "expert 2", etc.

I struggled for a long time with this consideration, and then I decided to explore "floating" human labor. This opened up a whole new world of understanding.
Robert mentions Capability in another thread, and although mentioned throughout the help files, there is nothing useful there or in any of the Epicor documentation that I have seen.

In order to use capabilities, you would need APS. I have spoken to many people who have purchased this license based on conversations they have had with me.
So, while I do not profess to be a manufacturing expert, Epicor has seen fit to use me as a reference.

Effectively, you can use capability to get around the one-to-one relationship between resources and resource groups.

Here is the basic example from Epicor:

Imagine you have 2 resources:
1) basic machining (3 axis requirement)
2) advanced machining (4 axis requirement)

I could set up 2 capabilities (effectively skill sets)
A) simple machining
b) Complex machining

I could set up the members of this capability as follows :
Cap A = 3 axis machine, AND 4 axis machine
Cap B = 4 axis machine (ONLY)

And this is a simple illustration of the one-to-many expansion.

But this is only basic. Suffice it to say, you now set your scheduling requirements based on capability, not resource or group.
You can assign schedules, vacations (and maint) by the group, or the specific resource...is cool now because I can schedule the exceptions for employee vacations.

But going a step further, I can then set load priorities on each resource with the capability. Therefore, in the labor capability of "Quality Inspection", I could choose to load the resources in the order of "Person 2, Person 3, Person 1.
This leaves my most cross-trained person available should he be needed elsewhere, but still available for any of the required operations.

Going a step further, I can qualify the operation standards based on he specific resource who actually does the labor.
For example, referring to the same labor capability, I would set up the operation and the standard for Person 2 to "1". This tells the system that with an op standard of x piece per hour, the percentage of the standard expected to be needed by Person 2 is 100-percent. I could then define the capability spec for person 3 to be ".8" which would tell the system to expect 80-percent the output of the standard (this resource works more slowly, or whatever....


Anyway, you can see that APS and capabilities are really quite powerful.
I have talked to so many people who would have been better off to start with APS had they known the true benefits...unfortunately not effectively explained by Epicor to the disservice of themselves as well as their customers.

The addition of APS gives you not only the listed benefit, but removes the 2 exception limit on operations of standard Vantange/Vista production.

Note that this does not answer questions about whether this is something you should do in your particular situation, but there is validity in your question.

I do not make it a habit of publicizing all of this information as I find it unfair to provide Epicor the benefit when corporately, they have not given my company other considerations ( I do not get free documentation), but will be happy to answer any direct questions anyone might have.

Meanwhile, it is midnight here and I am suffering with a Sinus infection, so undoubtedly, my hands have missed typiing something my head might not realize, so I apologize in advance if that is the case.

Carey


To: vantage@yahoogroups.comFrom: nimish_bhatia1@...: Fri, 21 Dec 2007 05:20:32 +0000Subject: [Vantage] Scheduling employees as resources




We are a machining and fabrication shop doing mostly made to order (orengineered to order) parts with approx 250 employees. We currentlyfeel that we have too many employees for the amount of work beingdone. One of the main reasons we want vantage is to see whichemployees are working on what jobs so we can understand ourproductivity better.In order to see the productivity, I would assume we need to create allemployees as individual resources and choose the appropriate resourcewhile scheduling a job. However, since I'm new to vantage, I'm notsure of the advantages and disadvantages of using this system. Itobviously adds more detail during the scheduling phase, but I'm notsure if there are other pros and cons that I can't think of. In fact,I'm not sure if this is too much detail for scheduling that we willnot be able to maintain in the long run.Can someone help me understand whether to go this route or not? Ifnot, what other ways are there to better see which employee is workingon which job so we can understand the productivity of employees on theshop floor.Thanks.






_________________________________________________________________
Share life as it happens with the new Windows Live.
http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_122007

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]