Scheduling production station that contain work centers

Business Central/NAV User Forum
1

Hello,

Hope someone can point us I. The right direction.

We have a limited amount of production stations (locations) to assemble our products and during the creation of a production order we would like to be able to constrain that order to a certain amount of stations that can be used (for instance 5). If the production order is for 20 products, we would like to see the scheduling of 5 products being scheduled parallel (at the 5 stations allocated) and this being repeated 4 times (4x serial at each station).

At each station a sequence of steps will be executed to assemble our product within a few days, some of them by our own employees and some of them by subcontractors (all activities are at the station in our factory). Some steps have to be serial, some of them can be parallel.

Problem

If we define the production locations (the stations) as work stations, we can assign concurrent capacity on a routing line. It could schedule multiple assemblies at the same time but it will not:

  • 1- Schedule the individual stations (for instance A1, A2, A3, A4 and A5)
  • 2- Allow us to define our subcontractors as work centers (we can not assign a work center (subcontractor) under another work center (assembly station)

All advice is appreciated, Nico

2

Nico,

Have you considered splitting your Production Order into multiple Production Orders? This can be achieved automatically (assuming you’re using the Planning Worksheet) using the Max. Order Modifier on the Item’s Planning Tab. By splitting the supply into multiple Production Orders you can then schedule them independently, so some are on your Work Centers and others are on the Sub-Contractor Work Centers. This will help give you better Expected, and potentially actual, Cost per assembly.

The control beyond splitting the order, in out-of-the-box BC, is limited. You may want to look into some of the scheduling solutions (recommend: MxAPS) available on AppSource.

Your partner would also be a good person to talk to as they may have their own recommendations on what can help solve your need.

Best Regards,
Ben Baxter
Accent Software, Inc.

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