First, you need to set up your basic schedule parameters and capacity parameters (to define during which hours of the day work may be scheduled in your company).

To do so head to Admin » Config Settings, and search for the following configuration settings:

• Work_start_hour (e.g. ‘8’ for 8:00am)
• Work_end_hour (e.g. ‘16’ for 4:00pm)
• By default, Cetec ERP only allows you to schedule work on Monday thru Friday, not on Saturday or Sunday.

Next, in order to model a schedule of work, the system must know (three) things about your company: your work locations, the capacity you have at those work locations, and the production demand against those work locations. Walk through the setup of each below.

Work Locations

Work locations represent where in your company work actually takes place. We call these “work locations” in Cetec ERP. You can set them up in Admin » Maintenance » Data Maintenance » OrdlineStatus. This is a master list of all locations where work might possibly take place in your company. Note that a “work location” could also be an outside service provider, if you send them your materials for outside service.

Capacity

Set up capacity constraints for finite production scheduling at each work location. Head to Admin » Maintenance » Data Maintenance » OrdelineStatus, and see the far right column labeled “Capacity Minutes Per Day”. By default, each work location is assigned the number of hours of availability per day during which work may be scheduled based on your company’s “work_start_hour” (8am, for example) and “work_end_hour” (4pm, for example) configuration settings.

However, you may further restrict a work location’s capacity per day if needed. For example, if a work location was only available for four out of the total eight hours you have available between your work_start_hour and work_end_hour, the schedule will only be allowed to assign four hours worth of work during any given day for that work location.

You may also inflate a work location’s availability per day beyond the hours available between your work_start_hour and work_end_hour. For example, what if my “work location” was a group of three machines or a group of three assemblers, each of which had eight hours available per day between the “work_start_hour” of 8am and the “work_end_hour” of 4pm.

To inflate capacity, change the “Capacity Minutes Per Day” accordingly (from 480 minutes = 8hrs to 1440 minutes = 24 hrs).

To enable allowing the inflation of capacity to effectively abbreviate the production schedule (i.e. so that the work can be done faster due to your increased capacity), remember to:

• Set the “allow parallel work” flag at that work location.

• Set the “Num Users” number at that work location so the system knows by what factor to allow and enable schedule abbreviation.

Finally, note that these capacities or time availability settings may also be adjusted per day via the Capacity Calendar. The capacities set in the Capacity Calendar per day will override the default capacity settings in the Admin table.

Production Demand

Understand that a work schedule is generated by the entry of “demand for work” into the Cetec ERP system through the entry of a “work order”.

The system must know three things to schedule a work order:

• what product you’re building. This is represented by the Prcpart BOM in Cetec, e.g. Prcpart FIGPRODUCT.

• what work locations are there for the steps in production in order to build that product

• how long at each work location it takes to build that product. For in-house production, this is defined by the ‘Build Operations’ you assign to each work location; for outsourced production, this is defined by the ‘lead times’ or ‘queue’ times in number of days you expect your items to be at outside service. Note! Lead times / queues times and also setup time build operations (i.e. non-recurring) will NOT multiply by the work order quantity in factoring production lead times.

Together, these things form the production “router” or “labor plan” for your product with its unique Production Lead Time, or, the amount of time you estimate it will take in order to build 1 product. (For a how-to tutorial on how to setup BOM Labor Plans, check out this tutorial

This production lead time (which is derived via the labor plan) will be multiplied by the quantity of product you input on a work order in Cetec, and will then be allotted on a schedule within the capacity parameters discussed above (e.g. not before 8am, not after 4pm, etc.) You can view this allotment of time(s) nicely in Gantt Chart view. (For a tutorial on using the prodution Gantt Chart schedule, see here.