We're going into year 4 with VISUAL and to date have not been able to effectively use the production schedule reports. A lot of this was lack of control over inventory and properly receiving WO's back in a way that the scheduler would not be accurate. Those issues have come a long way in the last 12 months and we're now facing issues with our initial set up of shop reources and engineer masters.
Currently, there's a lot of operations on engineer masters that only call out an individual for the resource. We want to change all operations to have an Operation Type that will call for one work center and at least one individual/group. Is there a way to view where resources are used in engineer masters? If not can someone share a query statement that would call out this information? We would need to locate not only operations that only call for an individual resource ID but also obsolete resource types that are in use.
We also have WO's that call for many parts but only have one labor tracking operation. Because of so many parts we created an Operation Type called "MATERIAL-GROUP" that calls on zero time and does not use any resources in the scheduler. There may be 5-10 of these in a WO and they're meant to categorize and group materials for that job. This allows us to easily identify a group of parts related to an option chosen by the customer and then replace with a different option/group of materials (we are not using any kind of configurator at this point. This is a manual process). These are not sub legs but instead in the main leg. Our labor tracking operation is then placed behind these MATERIAL-GROUP operations. This ensures the scheduler calls for the materials before scheduling the WO. This has been working fine for us but is there a better way?
Also, when subbing out the default materials for a different option it's currently a manual process usually leading to errors. We've debated making "template" part ID's in part maintenance that would serve strictly to hold an engineer master for different options. For example we might have a part ID for "water pumps" and in the engineer master we'd break out the BOM's of each option in different operations for easy copy and pasting into the WO's. We also thought of putting these different options in the primary engineer master itself but a lot of these options are options for multiple builds. So by holding them in their own part ID/engineer master we would only have to update that one master when changes are made verus having to update multiple masters that have the same options (hopefully that makes sense) Thoughts on this?
Is there any other thoughts or threads containing good discussions on how to better optimize the VISUAL scheduler and/or managing large material lists in WO's that are replaceable based on customer chosen options?
