Planning Board
The planning board provides an electronic version of those pegboard systems that used to adorn the walls of planning offices. It presents the individual tasks that make up a job as coloured blocks. You can control the colours of these blocks and the other information attached to them. Attached information can be any values you currently have stored against the job in your database.
- Horizontal and Vertical Views
- You can view the plan with the time axis either horizontal or vertical. Selection between these options is a matter of personal preference, although the number of work centres displayed on the plan at any one time and the type of information displayed on the individual tasks has a bearing on this decision.
There is also a weekly view for individual machines. As only a single machine is displayed the normal planning functions do not operate on this view, although it is very helpful for management reviews.
- Variable time frames
- The data can be viewed with time frames varying from 60 days to 6 hours,
with the resolutions of 4 hours to 1 minute
- Pick and Drop Functionality
- Tasks can be picked up and moved to another location on the plan. The user sets up rules for this ensuring that a task can only be moved onto a machine capable of processing it. Associated link tables change the duration of the task depending on the speed the machine operates at. This means that the impact on the schedule of moving a job to a faster or slower machine is immediately apparent.
Other checks within this mechanism indicate to the planner if the task is being moved to a place that will invalidate another part of the plan. This is especially necessary where multiple planners are controlling the production within separate inter-related departments.
- Web Read Only view
- A read only view of the Planning Board can be configured, so that the plan may be published throughout your company. The plan can be further restricted to only show a subset of the total number of work centres.
- Job highlight facility
- As the plan gets more complicated and extends into the future, it may become difficult to locate a specific job. To help with this there is a job search and highlight facility.
- Drill Down to view associated Task information
- When you let the cursor hover over a task block you immediately get a full summary of the information about that task. This is helpful when the task block is too small, at the current resolution, to display the information clearly.
You can double click on any task to get additional information about it. The subsequent screens allow you access to full information about the task, and its current tracking status. If authorised you can also edit the task here.
- Basic Shuts applying separately to each Work Centre
- Each machine can be configured with different operating hours, together with closure periods for weekends, holidays and maintenance. Repeated closures, such as weekends, can be temporarily over-ridden to allow for unplanned overtime.
- Preparation Time
- All tasks can contain a separate preparation element, which is shown differently on the Planning Board. This allows you to model processes where the machine needs to be set up, in some way. This set-up time can overlap with the end of previous process on a different machine