Tugboat Software Blog

Creating a labor schedule is a key engineering step in your production planning cycle. Given your multiple products and deadlines over multiple shifts, days or weeks and given the volatility of any pool of labor resources, can your production plans be completed on time? Whether work orders are created in QAD, SAP or Preactor, now there is an answer.

Tugboat’s Labor Scheduling solution, delivered Software-as-a-Service, fills a labor roster that begins as QAD Work Orders, or as a Preactor Order Sequence. The work orders are first converted into a Labor Demand including jobs with start and run times over shifts and days. Then SOS quickly fills the roster for the jobs given your available resources and rules, with optimized job assignments. Now there is visibility and control in your planning cycle for the review of a planned labor roster and how it can support or delay your production plans.

We recently attended the QAD Explore 2011 user conference in San Antonio, TX as a Silver sponsor. At the conference, we spoke with Derek Singleton, ERP Analyst, who had the to opportunity to catch up with Phil Friedman, Vice President of Marketing for QAD. Derek and Tugboat wanted to know what was new in QAD’s 2011 release. Phil explained their key announcements around business intelligence, mobile functionality, and a continued emphasis on cloud ERP.

Read more:

http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/manufacturing/whats-new-in-qad-2011-1051811/#ixzz1NTniiWNY

Even if an application appears to really meet one’s needs, there is always the challenge of implementation. A financial manager for Coca-Cola recently asked, “This application looks like it will do the job but answer this: how much trouble will we uncover when it comes to implementation?” He was specifically referring to the resistance that would likely occur from their schedulers and a unionized workforce.

When it comes to those that actually do the scheduling, most would rather do things the way they’ve been doing them – even if there is a little inefficiency and maybe hidden costs due to some redundancies. When it comes to the workforce, most will naturally want to avoid changes in how jobs are assigned. However assigning them more efficiently takes some analysis of the rules and policies that control how the workforce is currently scheduled.

So how do we implement a fully automated application like SOS without running into resistance from the schedulers and the workforce? Along with getting the data for jobs and people in place, a project usually starts with focus on the existing scheduling rules. However, there’s a lot more to automation than getting all the rules and policies analyzed and here’s a way forward.

Right from the start, even from the Internet at home, Tugboat’s solution enables workers to make requests for:

•    Overtime

•    Days off

•    Vacations

•    Training

•    Open jobs

This interface also makes reports easily available to the workers for:

•    Absences

•    Requests

•    Available OT

•    Scheduled jobs

This is a two-stage approach and it takes the pressure for change off of the schedulers. Automating requests and reports means, right from the start, less paper and less discussion with each and every worker. And the workforce? Automating requests and reports will make life on-the-job a little easier without raising questions about how jobs are assigned. It’s called empowerment. For management, the cost of getting to this level of implementation is fairly low. Having data for your existing workers and jobs uploaded into the application is all that’s required.

To summarize: save the challenge of analyzing and documenting all your rules and policies until a later stage. Get the easy stuff in and running for an early payback and buy-in from the workforce

There is are a lot of differences between labor scheduling software and production planning systems including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) systems. Here’s a simplistic picture. An ERP system generates orders. In certain manufacturing operations these are run through an APS system which schedules an order sequence including dates and assigned manufacturing resources. Whether you are talking about continuous or discrete manufacturing, both of these systems “schedule” and look forward in time.

However, notice that neither ERP or APS resolves orders into tasks performed by workers over a period of time. Who does the what and when? This is left for the workforce scheduling software to figured out. To understand the bridge between these two worlds lets look at the two different behaviors at work.

ERP and APS are focused on your products and when they will be available for delivery. Given your inventory and non-human resources, this level of planning can be defined by an order sequence and the delivery horizon. Like a control tower, for product planning, the order is go or no go.

In contrast, in the world of workforce scheduling the problem can change on a day-to-day or even hourly basis. Such changes may reorder the crewing generated by the rostering software for the next shift or day and these may or may not impact production’s ability to proceed. Labor scheduling is charged with seeing that the production gets performed by your human capital resources. In fact, the volatility associated with labor scheduling must be managed so that it can be isolated from the production schedule.

Labor scheduling requires that you solve a musical chairs problem. Before the music stops and people go to their jobs, input is required from very different systems from those used by ERP or APS systems.
Production requirements or orders are needed of course. However input is also needed from skills management, training scheduling, absentee and vacation scheduling, even shift and job rotation systems. Not to be overlooked are requests from supervisors or the employees. It is often typical that front-line supervisors will take the roster and make their own last minute adjustments as to who fills open jobs, who goes where or who gets overtime. Juggling these last-minute requirements prior to generating the labor schedule is the musical chairs problem.