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APB limitations, using third party scheduling software?

  • 16 November 2021
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Hi, it seems APB (Advanced Planning Board)has quite a few limitations, particularly around handling work centers with multiple resources. For example, scheduling a workcenter with 8 resources, how do you get the system to divide up the work and time it will take (perhaps 1/8 the time as a single resource)? Workarounds that have been floated include manually splitting up order lines as they come in (not scaleable) and fudging the efficiency factor to say, 800% in this example, also not great. Any other ideas that people have tried? If APB is not capable, have others used any third party scheduling software? Any recommendations?

Thanks

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Best answer by Björn Hultgren 17 November 2021, 16:50

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Björn Hultgren
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I’m not quite sure I got your requirement clear, but do you want to schedule an operation to use multiple resources on a work center?

That is not possible, one operation can be scheduled only on one work center resource. However, if you are on apps 10 or IFS cloud you can try setting up the work center with only one resource, then instead use the Resource Share on the routing operation to define how much of that resource the operation should utilize during its duration. so if you put 8/8 there it will use the full resource (and nothing else can be scheduled if finite), but if you put 2/8 other work can be scheduled the same time on that resource.

 

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Hi Bjorn, we have tried changing the Resource Share on the routing operation, but it doesn’t provide us with the desired result. It allows us to load the resource to match its real capacity, however, it doesn’t result in providing the correct finish date for the shop order operation. Some of our shop order lot sizes are rather large and if not scheduled on multiple resources, will extend our schedule and provide inaccurate start dates for succeeding work centers.

Björn Hultgren
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Yes you will need to define on the routing the number of resource the operation should allocate (like 4 out of 8 gives resource share 4/8), and then set the time it takes to execute the operation when performed on 4 resources in parallel.

You can setup different routing alternates to represent the required resource share and time with different number of resources allocated. You can also lot sized based routing alternates so that the system picks the correct alternate for a given lot size to the shop order. (say if over 1000 PCS use 5 resources, if over 2000 use 6 etc.)

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Bjorn, I asked Justin to respond, he’s our APB expert, we work together, if that wasn’t obvious. Thanks for your reply...hopefully you have some additional ideas.

 

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Unfortunately this solution isn’t working for us.

If we have a shop order that has a lot size of 9 and an operation run time of 1 hour/part, it is 9 hours of total processing time.

The work center has 3 resources. If we change the Resource Share on the routing operation to .333 (We can’t change the resource share to >1) to represent 3 resources, the result we are looking for is to have the total processing time of the shop order change from 9 hours to 3 hours (3 resources manufacturing 3 parts each).

Changing the Resource Share doesn’t change the processing time. It will only allow for more shop orders to be loaded at the same time as each other, due to the capacity requirement of our shop order being less.

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Björn Hultgren
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So if the work center has 3 resources and you want to setup a routing that allows the shop order to use either 1, 2 or all 3 of these you will need 3 alternates. If it takes 1h to produce 1 pcs on 1 resource it would look like

  • Alternate 1 - Resource Share = 0.33. Machine Run Factor = 1h/unit
  • Alternate 2 - Resource Share = 0.67. Machine Runt Factor = 0.5h/unit. Min Lot Size Based = 2
  • Alternate 3 - Resource Share = 1. Machine Run Factor = 0.33h/unit. Min Lot Size Based = 3

Now if you create a shop order for 1 pcs it will use alternate 1. so it takes 1h to produce and it will use 33% of the work center capacity during this 1h

If you create a shop order for 9 pcs it will use alternate 3. So it takes 3h to produce and will use 100% of the work center capacity during these 3h

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Hi Bjorn, thanks for continuing to contribute to this. Justin and I agree that these suggestions would technically work. The challenge is that none of them are remotely scalable because they require manual interventions each time. We have lots of orders coming in, trying to schedule large factories, and most workcenters have multiple resources. So, the workarounds suggested might be palatable for the very smallest of our divisions, but definitely can’t work for larger, more complex ones. Can you envision any way to reasonably automate these tasks? What are other APB customers doing? Surely most APB customers must run into these limitations and be in the same state we are? We are looking at external scheduling tools, but that’s not ideal and can be very expensive as well.

 

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