This article describes how QAD users can optimize usage of their production resources with Excel Loaders. Whether you use discrete work orders or advance repetitive schedule in QAD, offered Excel Loaders will enable your production planners to simulate production load scenarios before creating/updating WO’s or schedule in QAD. Thus, you will be able to plan production more accurately, use resources wisely, lower the cost and get higher returns.
What-If WO Management Workbench, designed for production planning in a discrete work order environment, allows to simulate and review work centers load even before creating or updating work orders in QAD database.
Capacity Report by Work Center is generated based on list of work orders on Orders List tab.
Work orders list can include work orders that have been downloaded from QAD and simulation work orders that do not exist in QAD yet.
What-If WO Management Workbench does not require users to run CRP Recalculation (24.1 Recalculate Capacity Plan) to be able to view work center load report. To generate Capacity Report by Work Centre user will need to click on CRP Report button.
Report shows what resources will be used by each work orders, available capacity for each resource and capacity required by each work order operation.
The load is subtracted from capacity
– Over-capacity appears as a negative number in the Remaining Capacity column.
– Under-capacity appears as a positive number.
Work order load and start date for each operation are calculated based on item routing. Available capacity is “consumed” by work order/operation based on their start date and WO sequence.
By default, What-If WO Management Workbench assigns the entire load for an operation to its scheduled start date. If operation run time is longer than one day or work center does not have required capacity, load can be rolled over to the next working day.
When Capacity Roll-over flag is set to “yes” excessive load is automatically rolled over to the next working day.
If work center or machine is over- or under-loaded, load can be balanced by modifying work center capacity or the timing and/or amount of the load.
With What-If WO Management Workbench you can check for available capacity before creating work order in QAD or modify work order due date and quantity to optimize usage of available capacity.
Production Scheduling Workbench, designed for production planning in a repetitive work order environment, allows to check capacity requirements for existing schedules and for new schedules before updating schedules in QAD database.
There are two different capacity reports are available in Production Scheduling Workbench:
- Capacity Report by Work Center and
- Capacity Report by Production line.
These two reports use different sources for capacity requirements and capacity availability calculations.
In QAD capacity resources can be work centers and machines and capacity requirements expressed through item routing. OR capacity resources can be production lines and capacity requirements expressed as units per hour for item on production line.
Depending on used approach to maintain capacity requirements and availability, either Capacity Report by Work Center OR Capacity Report by Production Line should be used.
Both reports are generated based on the scheduled quantities.
These quantities can include quantities downloaded from QAD and planned changes to production schedule, not recorded in QAD yet.
Production Scheduling Workbench does not require users to run CRP Recalculation (24.1 Recalculate Capacity Plan) to be able to view work center load report. To generate Capacity Report by Work Center user will need to click on Capacity by WC button.
This report is very similar to the one for What-if WO Management Workbench.
The load is subtracted from capacity
– Over-capacity appears as a negative number in the Remaining Capacity column.
– Under-capacity appears as a positive number.
When all available capacity is consumed remaining quantity will appear as positive number in Qty to Reschedule column.
Load on work center for each item and operation is calculated based on the standard item routing.
Start date for each operation is calculated forward from schedule date, taking into account operation move, wait, sub-contract, run, set-up, queue times and required overlap quantity.
Report shows what resources will be used by each work orders, available capacity for each resource and capacity required by each work order operation.
To generate Capacity Report by Production line user will need to click on Capacity by PL button.
Load on production line for each item is calculated based on production line capacity and units per hour rate for item/production line.
Capacity Report by Production line does not show capacity requirement for each operation, but uses units per hours rate defined for an item and production line .
Changeover time, that might be required when switching between items on the same production line consumes production line capacity and is reported as setup time for an item.
If production line is over- or under-loaded, load can be balanced by modifying production line capacity or the timing and/or amount of the load.
Capacity reporting functionality implemented in the tools above allows to analyze production plans for capacity constrains and streamlines resources and production planning in QAD.
For more information about 32Soft loaders please visit this page.