For a particular operation, I have a single Work Center Group comprised of 13 Work Centers (using AX 4.0). I am trying to do finite capacity Job Scheduling and have AX divide production orders among the 13 Work Centers. The problem is that AX keeps piling all of the jobs at a single Work Center and now the estimated completion dates far beyond the required ship dates.
I’ve looked at nearly every setup parameter/calander/work center setting I can find, but can’t get AX to recognize anything but a single Work Center.
So where are you setting the finite scheduling? Tell us what you have checked and we might be able to tell you what you have missed rather than suggesting everything you have checked.
I presume the routing is set against the group and not the one work centre?
By the way finite scheduling is not recommended - just for bottlenecks.
Yes, the routing is calling the group, not the individual work center.
On the Work Center form, the checkbox under “Scheduling” is checked for “Finite Capacity”…for all work centers and the work group. (boxes for Finite Property, Exclusive and Bottleneck resource are unchecked).
On the form for Job Scheduling, the Default Values > Limitations > Finite Capacity is checked.
Just a bit more background…we have 13 welders (people) and consider each one a work center (Weld1, Weld2, etc.) within the group “WeldFab”. Estimated hours for each job can range from 20 to 300. We setup AX off of our parent co. which actually has many more machine tools, using also groups / centers. We are much simpler. Their job scheduling does split jobs out to centers within a group, but for some reason ours does not.
People at both facilities have compared the setups between them and can not see where the difference is that is causing the problem. I was hoping the question would jog a “seen it before, try this”…
The only other thing to do is go back through the routing, work centre group, work centre relationship and settings, but I would guess you have that covered,
Nothing in standard AX I can think of off the top of my head that would cause this with the settings you have.
I’m not aware of mods related to this…we tried to keep as much out-of-the-box as possible. I have asked the guys who did the initial deployment to review, but they are stumped as well. I appreciate the look…I’ll update if we can locate the issue.
Was the data imported into the system? Could be an error there.
A quick test for ALL parameters would be to set up one group manually, two work centres, add this to the route and schedule two works orders for the same day - 15 minute test and you will know if it is “some” parameter or data related to the work centres.
The requested ship date is from a sales order? If your requirement comes from sales orders delete all production orders and try to run master planning instead, this will do backward scheduling from requirement date. It should work.
Fabricio - The date is not the issue, it is the scheduling against one WC, which is an indication of it being infinite, when everything as setup as finite.
well, if you want to distribute the load equally among all the work centers, then setting the Quantity= 13 in Production>Setup>Routes>Operations>Operations relation>General tab>Quantity will do the trick. It will ask for brining down the process time to which u say yes.
I have a bigger problem. I want to allocate load such that the work center with the highest capacity is fully occupied and then the next highest capacity and so on. Is it achievable? If yes, how?
I have three machines M1, M2 and M3 having capacity 1, 2 and 3 kg/day capacities respectively. On a particular day, I have a production order of 4 kg. I create the production order and run job scheduling. I expect AX to create two jobs: one in the 3 kg machine and one in the 1 kg machine, so that the production gets over in one day.
It seems like a common scenario in production. I feel that I am missing some setup. Let me know if it is still not achievable.
I understood the scenario and I disagree ir is a common scenario - very few businesses can remove a produce mid flow and put it on another machine, this ad hoc movement would never be scheduled and elements like setup etc would actually cause delay and costing issues in most business. As you are referencing kgs you are probably in a process driven industry which is different to discrete manufacturing. In these instances the requirement is also not common as it is a continual flow until completion. Whilst I have had something similat the machines were combined as one machine for full capacity, because this was what it really was. In these instances there were 2 machines and a continual flow, but we referenced this as one work center in AX with double the capacity.
Thanks for your clarification regarding the feasibility of the functionality.
But since I need to deliver this functionality, I will appreciate any suggestion that you might provide regarding the best approach to solve the problem. (either by modification or work around). It will be a repetition, but just as a reference, I am attaching the complete scenario as below:
My client is in the business of bakery and manufactures bakery products. We are implementing the production module in the company and trying to map the bakery process into ax.
The production is of manufacture to order type where planned production orders will be created from sales orders using master planning. The production happens through the following stages:
From the raw material (flour, yeast, sugar, water) to dough. (measured in Kg)
From dough to Raw bread (measured in pieces)
From Raw bread to baked bread. (measured in pieces)
Now, in the 2nd stage, i.e. from dough to raw bread, the production can be done in batches of fixed capacities of dough. E.g. the raw bread can be produced any of 40, 30, 20 or 10 kg batches of dough.
The requirement is to configure the system such that it automatically generates different production jobs (or split the production order) according to the batch sizes, from the total production quantity.
Example: There is an order to for 100 cases of bread. (=200 quantities of bread if 2 breads/case). For 200 breads, let dough required is 110 kg. So for the second operation (i.e. dough to raw bread) system should generate the production job/schedule as below
3 nos of 30 kg batches
1 no of 20 kg batches
Is there any way I can make the system generate these job batches automatically?
I tried to achieve this using work center capacity and process quantity but could not achieve this. The system goes on scheduling the job on the same machine rather than scheduling on a different machine.
What I would do in your case is to do operation scheduling in master planning to see if requirement date can be fullfilled, then after firming the order I would just start the production order and then report consumption manually on each of the available work centers.
I would also read about process manufacturing in Ax to see if your requirement is supported.
Did you ever get an answer to your issue? I have a similar issue with AX2009 - I have tried many things but each job is scheduled to the first work centre in my work centre group. Even if there is another work centre with available capacity earlier the job is just added to first work centre.
No, I never got a solution to my query. I could not setup my workcenters in such a way that if a work center is fully occupied, system schedules it in the next work center.
