Improve Manual Scheduling Using Operation-level Firming

Welcome to the demonstration of the 24D Improved Manual Scheduling Using Operation-level Firming feature in Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Planning, Production Scheduling.

With this update, you can now form individual work order operations and have a subsequent solve respective forming decisions. You can form the operation style type, the operation resource selection, or both. This is useful in multi-stage manufacturing environments where you may want to fine tune and form the schedule on a key bottleneck stage and then have the upstream and downstream stages aligned to that bottleneck stage via a subsequent solve action.

The result is increased control and influence over the scatter result, a more efficient manual scheduling process, and improved scatter quality. The following demonstration shows you how you can use this feature to enhance your business.

Here I already logged into Oracle applications cloud and navigated to the Supply Chain Planning applications from where I can launch Production Scheduling by clicking on the Production Scheduling icon. Now Production Scheduling opened and displays me the landing page, which consists of the list of production schedules. For this demonstration, the very first schedule on this list called Demo Schedule 01 is one of interest, so I will open it by clicking on its title.

This now opened the Gantt Chart, where I can see resources and work order operations that are scheduled on these resources. In this example, I have a multi-stage manufacturing process where the final stage is an assembly, which can be performed in one of three assembly resources. I can see that I do have changeovers between operations on the assembly lines, and these are driven by attributes.

So let's see what these attributes are. And I can do that via attribute-based highlighting, clicking in the Highlight Attribute dropdown and selecting Attribute Mode. So this mode is associated with work order operations, and different attribute values now have different colors, and different attribute values also trigger changeover in between, as we can see.

For this demonstration now, I will try to improve a little bit on the changeover time and see whether I can reduce some of these changeovers. So I will go ahead and pick a block of operations that is scheduled at the end of assembly line 1 and see whether moving that earlier to block of operation with the same attribute value, whether this will improve the schedule.

Before doing that, I can observe via the pegging link highlighting that the upstream stages are very well synchronized to these operations. Now, making the change is a simple drag and drop. I can specify a precise start time in this dialog that just came up called Target Start Time. For now, I will just accept the start time that I got from the drop action by clicking OK. Now I need to go ahead and implement this change via the schedule repair. So I click on the Repair action.

So now I can see that the repair completed and the block of operations that I moved is now nicely scheduled after like operations that were scheduled earlier. But what did it do to the schedule synchronization?

Let's select some of these operations again. And we can see that the upstream production was not moved. These workers were not scheduled earlier, and this is expected because the repair only reschedules work orders and operations in the work orders that were actually moved. So upstream work orders are not explicitly rescheduled.

To establish feasibility, I would have to now manually move all these operations earlier. Otherwise, I will have an infeasible schedule. This, of course, is fairly cumbersome, and this is really the motivation for the enhancement that we built first the operation level forming.

So let's demonstrate that. What I can now do is I can multi-select operations on the assembly resource that I just modified from them and then run a solve and have those forming decisions from my previous manual scheduling activities respected. I quickly turn off the pegging links. Now I will multi-select operations that I scheduled on the assembly line 1. And I open by clicking on the Edit icon site drawer, where I can make certain data changes to these work order operations.

Here, I have 107 work order operations selected. And what I want to do is to set the attribute fixed start time to Yes and the attribute offloading allowed to No, meaning a subsequent solve action should keep the times of these operations, the start times of these operations, as they are. And it should also not move the operation to an alternate resource. So I click on the Update to save these data changes on the back end.

I see that the update was completed now. All 107 work order operations were updated. And I can verify these data changes by using some additional highlighting capabilities. For example, I can say, well, to display all the operations where I have a fixed start time, and I can see these are the ones that I just now updated. I remove that again.

Similarly, this kind of information is also visible in the dispatch list. So I open the tabular views again by clicking on the expand. But I see the dispatch list, and I'm already on assembly resource 1. So if I scroll to the right, I can see that the form status is set to a fixed start time, and offloading allowed is unchecked for these operations, exactly what I specified.

OK, let's collapse this section again. And the idea now is that I formed the schedule on the assembly resource 1, and I want to make sure that upstream manufacturing gets aligned. So I can launch a solve action to do that.

OK, now the solve action completed, and I can verify the alignment of the manufacturing stages again. I do that by, again, selecting a few of these operations and activating the Show Pegging Links. So in this case, I can now see that the upstream stages are aligned again in a feasible manner.

And this now concludes the demonstration. Thank you for watching. You can refer to the "Supply Chain Planning 24D What's New" document for more information on this feature.