SFL

Basic Principles of Shop Floor Loading (SFL) and Load Vs Capacity (LvC)

CAPACITY: “Cumulative hours of the shifts applied to each work centre, multiplied by the number of machines available”

LOADING: “Any Outstanding time on an Outstanding Operation on a WO that is incomplete will be considered as work still to be carried out”

Shop Floor Loading does not take into consideration any purchased material requirements. The system will assume that any required material will be available for the works order commencing. The system will take into consideration any lead time set up against subcontract processes that may be contained as part of the works order routing.

Examples of what SFL and LvC can be used for:

1.Assess outstanding hours by WO or WC by filtering the Work to List Screen, and seeing the number of hours at the foot of the screen.

2.Use the LvC to view graphs of the planned hours on each WC and whether there is Capacity available to fulfill the work (based on the start date of the WOs) and therefore make decisions (e.g. whether work should be moved to different WCs, whether more hours are required etc).

3.In SFL, schedule priority operations then schedule the remaining operations to change the dates of each operation on a WO, which can then be used to produce a Work To List sorted by the dates generated by the schedule. The LvC graphs can then be used to see how evenly the work is spread across the work centres, in case any further decisions need to be made.

Preparation:

Hours: To schedule jobs into SFL, there must be times planned against each operation

Live Operations: It is very useful if times can be recorded live against each operation to ensure the outstanding times on each operation are accurate. If operations are then completed before the planned hours have been used up, it is essential the ops are marked as complete, so no hours will be scheduled.

Live Works Orders: To ensure you are scheduling only live jobs, it is essential the Works Orders are kept up to date, in terms of receipting the correct quantities and thereafter completing it.

Before starting to use SFL and LvC the operations and Works Orders must be tidied and updated.

Work Centre Capacities:

It is essential the Work Centres are setup to replicate how your machines are setup in practice and reflect the number of hours you have available.

WC shift: the shift you apply to a work centre will set the gaps you have available to fit the Works Order operations into. The shift is setup in maintenance > shifts.

No. Machines: This will increase the number of hours available for that Work Centre by the number of machines available.

Efficiency: When scheduling, if the efficiency is set to 50% then the operation on that work centre will take twice as long.

Dates:

Dates are very important to allow jobs to be prioritised and it is essential they are setup properly to start with.

A Sales Order is entered with a required date.

When the Works Order is created from the SO, the SO required date minus margin of error sets the finish date of the master WO.

The Start date of the master WO is the SO required date minus the part's lead-time, minus any margin of error.

Any lower level WO takes their finish date from the start date of the master WO, and their start date is the finish date minus the lead-time of the part, and so on down the levels.