In Kinetic, there has always been a shopload table, and this shopload “simply” is a summary of all the hours consumed in the shop, it is mostly designed around the “infinite” scheduling concept, so that you can show that you have X hours schedule for a resource that only has Y hours available.
In my experience, there are very few customers who ever use this table, and yet, the system takes much time updating it every time a job is scheduled/rescheduled, deleted, etc.
MY QUESTIONS:
How are you using it?
If we were to change how (or if) it was built, how would this affect you?
do you have any customizations against this table? Custom Reports?
I don’t use ShopLoad. It looks like it has a mix of records with and without ResourceID’s, which is probably because we use mostly groups on our MOM’s and only rarely assign specific machines. Normalizing that in reporting didn’t seem worth the effort.
I’m not quite sure how I want to answer this… I was using it and think it’s a great tool, but the graphs were clunky to use. I suggest writing graphs off shop load tables because it is already giving you the capacity per the associated calendar and the load. I don’t have anything written against it now but would be interested in the changes you are making. I consider this one of the underutilized tools in Epicor.
Jenn
I have used it when I want to create some what if scenarios.
Because it has the time buckets by day, amount of actual hours already applied…
I am currently implementing a dashboard to show hours left in a job and also jobs that could be run on resource that happens to be free at the time.
(haven’t searched for other ways the dispatch report is created)
@timshuwy Is the table you are referring to the ResourceTimeUsed?
Here’s a quick query showing what is in the table.
ResourceTimeUsed is what I’ve worked off of also, namely LoadDate, LoadDays, and LoadHours. The delimited format of the last two is a pain and bound to be fragile but it’s the closest thing I’ve found to build interactive reporting off of. It’s necessary for us to build our own reporting because we do tons of make-to-order work and questions like “When are the 50 anvils for Acme scheduled to be cast, sorry I don’t remember the order number and what even is a job number” need to be answered quickly.
We dont use it. Looked at it when I started( 10 years ago…) but our Resources are people and the powers that be before I got here thought it would be a good idea to mirror our general operating areas with Resource (s). we have way more resources than we do people in the shop. Never got around to pushing for 1 resource( maybe 2 or 3 ) ie…setup, assembly, packaging . Then would be easy to see how much work needed vs resources we have( man hours per day/week) … People do shift around quite a bit to cover different needs. We run off Std Cost and I am still wrapping my head around Variance accounting…
Seems to be a good resource but as they say GIGO…
I used it during a project to set up global scheduling and change to forward scheduling. I made a BAQ using the ResourceTimeUsed table and then had power bi make a load vs. capacity bar chart. It was the best way I found to show the hours per day per machine for jobs that take multiple days or weeks.
@DeanMiller We are people also, but I made them generic and have a ubaq to move them around as the headcount changes. Fun fact: Epicor considers a resource as a possibility of coming back on line, so even if you make then inactive they can show as potentially available. To get around this I transfer the inactive resources to an inactive resource center.
Nothing like accidentally inactivating a resource group and it automatically inactivating the resources… Did that a few times in the past when I was working with E9, a lot of upset users not being able to enter in time
Yes, using it a lot, it is a great table to get simple EDD graphs or dashboards, also combined with the ShopCap to get an overview in workload / overload per day / week /month per resource or resource group.
From the Resource time used table it is not as easy to get the load per day.
If the change in the Shop Load will also change the data in the table, it will need som rework on graphs and dashboards on several of our customers.
Question: as it is only updated within the Overload horizon, the time the systeem need to update it could not be a reason to change the table, or am i wrong? If you don’t want to update this table used, just don’t use the overload.
We used ShopCap with ResourceTimeUsed to create a BAQ that gives us load hours in daily buckets. We use it look for future peaks against production areas (resource groups) or tools (resources) so that we can try and smooth things out.
We rarely use it in sales to estimate shop capacity. We estimate the resource capacity, then subtract the load to “prove” we have room for a job. We don’t trust this a lot, so we only use it when pushed for details. Since we aren’t scheduling properly, the load on this report has always been questionable.
Our production management team uses it mostly in summary mode. I even had to create a BAQ as our production manager wanted a 12 week version instead of the default 6 weeks. Shop Load Report - WrkCtrCap calculations?
As a mostly implementation consultant, I don’t get this deep into these particular weeds, but this is the kind of thing hardcore production folks drool over… and during early stages of an implementation showing them this can really help wrap their heads around how to set up resource groups and resources. It would be a shame if it went away.
I have many customers using this report. The main question we receive is how can this be a dashboard and can it display more than the 6 buckets.
Most want to be able to display on the shop floor with their department/resource specific data.
We usually add the part number and description to the report.
