Our company is trying to get some form of scheduling working through Epicor and have hit a snag. We have several departments that have fewer Operators than Resources. An example would be our machining department - 9 Resource Groups, 11 Resources between those Resource Groups, 3 actual Operators.
How can we get Epicor to properly schedule this department?
My recommendation would be to set up the Employees as a resource and have them be finitely scheduled. Also, set the machines to be infinitely scheduled.
We did this generically with team members. We have 9 teams with 6-15 members and none of it ties to actual employees. Epicor schedules in blocks, so production calendar for days and hours then times team members to give you available hours by day in whole hours for that resource group.
The jobs get assigned the number of generic resources for the hours that we plan to earn per day on that job.
We do the same as @gpayne and @jkane suggest. Essentially all of our Operators are virtual, so they get scheduled with the machines and we ‘fill’ the slots with real people.
We decided to do this b/c of cross-training, substantial call-outs, new-hire training, etc. - all of this didn’t allow for smooth scheduling of actual people. It’s easier to look at the upcoming two weeks and make sure we have enough folks assigned to each area.
Thank you very much for the responses.
Would anyone be willing to share an example of what this looks like implemented on a job? Trying to picture how this is set up.
Here is an operation. You have time 86.67 hours, scheduling blocks or machines that provide what Epicor calls the “squeeze factor” and a resource group. You are setting up the math in hours of what you expect to earn on a job from those resources.
From field help:
Defaulted from the WrkCenter.SchMachines field. This is the number of machines that this operation will run on at the same time. Logically thought of as a “Squeeze factor” to scheduling. That is the more machines, the shorter the schedule. This affects how much of the total daily workcenter capacity that the operation will consume.
