Dynamics 365 F&O/AX Dynamics 365 CE / CRM Dynamics GP Business Central / NAV UG Dynamics SL Power Platform Fabric UG MS Copilot UG

[Jessica Murphy]

The majority of our jobs are completed manually and not by equipment.  Currently all of our routes are made based on what it would take for 1 person to create 1 item in an hour.  Some of our jobs require that a group of 5 will complete the job.  Is there a way to set up a route to show that 5 people must be on a job?  What are the pros and cons if this is possible?

——————————
Jessica Murphy
Master Planner
Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana
Indianapolis IN
——————————

[Karen Polzin]

Hi Jessica,

We also use work centers on the our routings.

There are also operations used for the steps needed, such as operation 10 maybe cut, operation 20 maybe bend, operation 30 maybe weld, etc.

something like the snapshot here.

——————————
Karen Polzin
Spectrum Industries
Chippewa Falls WI
————————————————————————-

[Sean Blais]

We use Work Center Groups to accomplish this. Depending on the job the WCG can have any number of Work Centers, (Employees in this situation).

——————————
Sean Blais
Operations Support
Sutphen Corporation
Dublin OH
————————————————————————-

[Chan Stevens]

On each routing step, when adding the resource requirement(s), there’s a field called “quantity” that defaults to 1. That’s the number of resources the operation will take. Change that to 5 and it will plan on using (5) people to do the work.

When making this change, pay attention to the math and costing. If you’re currently at 1 person and 1 hour and change to 5, if you don’t change the time down to 0.2 hours you’ve now quintupled the planned capacity load and cost.

Also, make sure you have an appropriate number of resources available, otherwise the orders won’t schedule. If using operation scheduling (runs against the resource group), then you just need to make sure the group level capacity factors like capacity, units and operation scheduling percentage are sufficient, which shouldn’t be a problem if you’ve correctly updated both the number of people and run time on the route***. If you’re using job scheduling (at the resource, not group level), then you’d have a real proble if you don’t have at least as many individual resources defined as you’re calling out in the route. Some companies try to avoid the nuisance of setting up individual resource ID’s for every employee and just list a few with grossly overstated efficiency factors to reflect the capacity of the real headcount. For example, rather than set up (5) distinct assembly resources, they set up one single resource but an efficiency factor of 500%. If you then change your route to call out 5 resources, it doesn’t matter how uber-productive the single resource is, the job needs 5 and AX can only assign 1 so it won’t schedule.

*** If you’re not running job scheduling, to the resource level, or faking out your real resource tracking by using the uber-productive approach I describe, then I can’t see any benefit or purpose to trying to reflect the true number of people needed within the route since you wouldn’t be utilizing any of the functionality that relies on the accuracy of that data.

——————————
Chan Stevens
Industry consultant
Cincom Systems
Cincinnati OH
————————————————————————-

[Valerie Herrick]

Hi Jessica,

Yes you can setup your resource to allow for 5 people. In the job you can go to the operation you want to add for (5) and update the quantity.

here we show 1 but change that to 5 and reschedule.

in order to allow for 5 you also have to have that qty of resources in that work group or resource group (depending on what ax you carry) You will also need to make sure that resource group has the resources setup to show the ability to use 5 people/resources.

——————————
valerie herrick
Spectrum Industries
Chippewa Falls WI
————————————————————————-

[Jessica Murphy]

So what are the pros and cons of setting up the work centers?  We’ve been tossing around the idea so we can eliminate the over abundance of production scans.  Our workforce is very limited with knowledge of scan guns, and we have an extremely high turn over rate.  (That’s a good thing for us! :D)

The current thought is that if we set up work centers, then we can remove the individual scans for each person, and just scan the over all process when a job is finished.  (Old bad habits, and people not understanding ERPs, were trying to use AX as an efficiency system by completing individual production scans on the hour.)

We currently have everything as an operation 10, but I feel that is ok, since the majority of our processes do not have several steps or sub-assemblies.  So would that help us?  What happens if the route is set up for 3 people and we have 6 or 2 clocked into the job?  

Another idea is to have bar codes for people to clock into the “area” they are working, and then scan the production to the lead in the area.  How does everyone else report production?

Sorry for the long post, there are just several opportunities to fix our process and I’m not really sure where to start. 

——————————
Jessica Murphy
Master Planner
Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana
Indianapolis IN
————————————————————————-

[Chan Stevens]

The answer to your question basically just comes down to where on the spectrum of capturing information and controlling things you lie. On one extreme, we don’t care at all about what’s going on, don’t have any transaction inputs, don’t track work in process progress (operation completions), and are blissfully ignorant. On the other extreme, we’ve practically got real time tracking of exactly where every order is, who’s working on it, what they had for breakfast, and when it will be done. Most companies fall somewhere in between 🙂

In terms of reporting at the workcenter level (operations scheduling) instead of employee level (job scheduling), workcenter is simpler because it’s less detailed, though also less precise. Is it sufficient to know that something is supposed to be scheduled for “Tuesday”, or would you rather know “Start Tuesday at 10:40AM, complete by 3:10PM, then a buffer of 6 hours before starting the next operation”? If you have 10 employees working in that area who are paid anywhere from $12/hr to $18/hour, mix in some overtime or shift premiums, etc., are you OK with all work being costed at some blended average of the team, or would you want to cost at the employee’s specific average, or go even further to cost jobs on Monday at the employee’s straight time but the jobs hitting at the end of the week at the employee’s overtime rate?

This is a question you’ll really need to involve your accounting folks in as well, because in general payroll and inventory issues toss money into a bucket of WIP, and labor reporting and production order completions take money out of that bucket. You want to make sure at the end of the day/month/year there’s nothing significant left in that bucket. When you start making changes to the way you track or report, you run the risk of messing up that bucket.

My recommendation, since you don’t seem to have much confidence in the reliability or accuracy of any information your employees would be reporting, is to backflush using standard/planned hours regardless of whether you go workcenter or resource level. The decision between the two then comes down to what you need for planning the work–is total planned load against the workcenter sufficient to confirm that you’re able to get the work done? Do you need the specifics of headcount assigned to each order? Do you run into problems where you have too many plates spinning at once, or too many people crowding around too few orders? From the sounds of it your implementation and environment are still mastering the basics, in which case trying to track and manage at the resource level is probably overkill and/or beyond the capabilities of current people and processes.

——————————
Chan Stevens
Industry consultant
Cincom Systems
Cincinnati OH
————————————————————————-