Manage Flow Schedules for Manufacturing Execution on a Production Line

Welcome to the demo of the 25A feature, Manage Flow Schedules for Manufacturing Execution on a Production Line in Oracle Fusion Cloud Manufacturing. Flow manufacturing is a method of manufacturing characterized by running a continuous production of similar products, often single piece flow on a production line at a steady rate to align with customer demand. The production workflow is designed with lean manufacturing and just in time principles in mind where consistent and standardized operations are executed with streamlined cycle times built in quality and minimal waste and changeovers.

Flow manufacturing applies to a subset of manufacturers that run uninterrupted production lines at a constant rate to make similar products based on customer orders. Production is managed through flow schedules that are created and scheduled based on the line rate and available working hours. A flow schedule contains information about what needs to be produced, in which production line, by when, and in what quantity. With this feature, you can manually create a flow schedule for an item based on the selected flow manufacturing work definition to build it on a production line at a certain rate.

You can also fulfill back-to-back supply requests for standard and configured items with flow schedules through Supply Chain Orchestration. SCO also manages any changes that happen either on the back-to-back sales order or on the flow schedules to keep the demand and supply in sync. For any given production line, the flow schedule summary page provides a week's worth of information displaying day wise planned load on the production line, the line capacity, and the net available capacity after considering the production load.

This helps in identifying overload situations that need to be addressed. Using the Reschedule action, users can manage production bottlenecks and level load production lines. And on any particular day, users can resequence schedules to fulfill priority orders. To summarize, these capabilities enable flow manufacturers to streamline manufacturing of products on production lines and synchronize production activities based on customer demand.

In this demo, we will see how you can manage flow schedules using the Redwood experience. First, we will log in to Work Execution landing page and click on the Manage Flow Schedules action. Being in the Work Execution Overview page, we will click on the Manage Flow Schedules action to select a production line to review the details of the corresponding flow schedules. As you can see here, the production lines that have been defined for the organization are displayed. We will now review the flow schedule summary of a production line.

For the production line, the flow schedule summary page displays a day-wise view of the planned quantity, past due quantity, line capacity, and the available capacity for a week. It provides a filter chip to select a date to review summarized information for the week that the date belongs to. The planned quantity on a particular day represents the aggregated quantity of the flow schedules that are scheduled to be completed on that day.

The past due quantity represents the sum of the quantities of the flow schedules for which the completion date occurs in the past. The line capacity represents the number of units that the line is supposed to produce on a particular day. It is determined by multiplying the line rate with the available hours on that day.

The available hours are obtained from the plant calendar. The available capacity is determined by subtracting the planned quantity and the past due quantity from the line capacity. The flow schedule summary also displays the day-wise quantities of items that are planned to be produced on a particular day.

Now let's navigate to the day-wise view to review the flow schedules that are scheduled to be completed on a particular day. We will click on the hyperlink of a day to review the flow schedules that are planned to be completed on that day. As you can see here, the Flow Schedules page displays the schedules that are planned to be completed on a selected day.

It provides a filter chip to select a specific date to review the flow schedules planned to be completed on that date. Using the Status filter chip, you can search for flow schedules by a specific status such as scheduled, past due, completed, and canceled.

Now let's talk about the creation of flow schedules. As mentioned earlier, you can manually create a flow schedule for an item based on the selected flow manufacturing work definition to build it on a production line at a certain rate. You can also fulfill back-to-back supply requests for standard and configured items with flow schedules through Supply Chain Orchestration.

In such cases, SCO orchestrates the automatic creation of flow schedules to fulfill the sales orders. Now let's create a flow schedule by clicking on the Create Flow Schedule button. First, we will enter an item for which we will create a flow schedule. Next, we will select a work definition.

Next, we will enter a completion date. We will now enter a quantity for the schedule. We can also enter and maintain any additional information in the descriptive flexfields configured for the flow schedule. Having entered the details, we will click on the Create button to create the flow schedule.

As you can see here, a toast message is displayed confirming the successful creation of the flow schedule. Now let's review the details of a flow schedule. Here are the details of the flow schedule. You can edit the completion date and the descriptive flexfield values.

Next, let's walk through two important actions that you can perform to manage flow schedules. The first one is the Reschedule action. In order to manage production bottlenecks and achieve level loading of a production line across dates, you can use the Reschedule action to reschedule one or more flow schedules to a different date if there isn't enough capacity available on the scheduled date of production.

To cater to such situations, we will select the flow schedules that we would want to move out to a different date and click on the Reschedule action. Next, we will select a new completion date to reschedule the flow schedules. We will now save the records by clicking on the Save button.

As you can see here, the flow schedules have been rescheduled, and the toast message is displayed confirming the same. Next, let's review how you can resequence a flow schedule on any particular day to cater to a situation where a rush order needs to be fulfilled. In order to resequence flow schedules, we need to click on the Resequence action.

Next, we will resequence the flow schedule ending with 26 and manually drag it to prioritize and change the build sequence. We will now save the record. As you can see here, the flow schedule ending with 26 has been resequenced.

In addition to these actions, you can perform other actions such as updating or canceling a flow schedule. You can also print product labels for flow schedules. This is how you can manage flow schedules and flow manufacturing.

This concludes the feature demo. Thank you for watching.