Scheduling is a visualisation of the information from some of the other pages such as Products or Production Orders lists and is an alternative method to both view and edit this.

1. Access the Scheduling page from the side menu. In here you will see a table displayed, which is the Scheduling view.

2. In the top left of the page there is a drop-down list where you can choose from several options of which data type you would like to view. Production Order scheduling is one of the most useful options in here, so we will focus on this, but the others work in the same way.

With Production Order selected, the table will update to display each row as a Production Order, and each column as a calendar day, grouped by the calendar week number above this. From Filters in the top left of the page you can change how this table is displayed, including the time scale to instead display in hours, weeks or months.

In the table you will see a number of bars which represent the Production Orders. These show when they are scheduled to start and end, and you can hover the cursor over these to view this information in more detail.

These bars are colour coded, with a key for these colours in the bottom left of the page. Any green Production Orders are those which are completed, red are delayed meaning they are not completed and past the scheduled completion date, and blue have a due date scheduled for the future which can include those who have already started.

If you need to adjust the start and end date of any Production Orders this can be done directly from this Scheduling view, by dragging the bars forwards or backwards in time. You can move the entire bar, shifting the whole Production Order in the schedule, or drag one end to change only the start or end time.

This is a very useful method for adjusting your schedule instead of needing to go into every individual Production Order to edit them. As the changes applied here will also update the Production Orders themselves.

You’ll notice when you move one of these bars that the Load value at the top of the table may change. The load is the total number of hours needed for the operation scheduled to occur. Is calculated by the task duration defined for each operation, multiplied by the quantity ordered on the production order. It is shown here as a percentage, which is the percentage of Load to Capacity, where Capacity is how many hours of work can be carried out according to the workers who are scheduled at that time.

For example, if there are two workers on an eight hour shift each, the Capacity will be 16 hours.

At the bottom of the table you can see the Load bars against the Capacity plotted as a line. If you hover over a Load bar it will display the total Load, in hours.

If this value goes above the Capacity this column will display in red at the top, to indicate that the Load is too high for the workers, and you will need to adjust the schedule.

Another useful view, especially for production in machine shops is the scheduling for machines.

When you switch to this view, you will see that the rows change from production orders to the machines

Now the items on the table are the operations to be completed on each machine.

In this table, you can easily view if there are any clashes in the planned production.

On the machines again, you can drag and drop the operations to adjust the schedule if needed and the load bars will update as you do so.

From the top right of the page, you can switch the viewing between Gant, calendar and list to display the data in different ways.

You should now have a good understanding of how to use Scheduling, which is a useful way to check that the planned work is at the right level of load against capacity, seeing any issues in advance, and quickly adjusting the schedule to help correct for these.

If after reading this article you still have some doubts, feel free to reach out to us through our Live-chat feature, or directly to your CSM.