Using Workforce Scheduling in the Production Supervisor Workbench

Welcome to the demo of the 25B feature, Using Workforce Scheduling in the Production Supervisor Workbench in Fusion Manufacturing. In the 25B update, supervisors can now access their operator schedule using workforce scheduling. From the production supervisor workbench, they can view the schedules and access operator availability for a shift. They can make changes to the schedule to accommodate for unplanned changes and requests.

Supervisors assign operators to workstations based on demand and availability. They benefit from getting a complete picture of the workforce availability. Supervisors can use this published information to assign operator to workstation during or before the shift. They are better prepared for current and upcoming shift by being able to make changes to schedule ahead of time.

First, let us understand how Workforce Structures are integrated with manufacturing. On the left, we have Workforce Structures such as departments and scheduling groups, which are necessary for scheduling. Workers are assigned to a job and a department similar to how resource instances are modeled to work at a work center. Let us say there are work centers performing milling operation, which is represented as a department called milling. Workforce modeled in the department are equivalent to labor available in these work centers.

Similarly, a production resource used for such a department, let's say miller, can be represented as a scheduling group that, in turn, provides a way to determine the workers who do miller related jobs. It is also important that department and manufacturing plant share the same location. By mapping both work centers and jobs to corresponding departments and scheduling groups, we can derive the pool of eligible workers.

This eliminates the need to model persons as resource instance separately for manufacturing. Please note that you may model many work centers as a department, and many resources as a scheduling group. It is recommended you model them as distinct departments and scheduling groups, which would allow for scheduling to be performed more precisely.

Now, let us understand how plant calendar integrates with scheduling. Scheduling uses enterprise shifts. These shifts can be defined as equivalent shifts that are used in the plant and work centers. The enterprise shifts are integrated with facility schedule through a schedule generation profile.

For example, there is a plant calendar that operates three shifts. We can model a profile with the same three shifts as operating shifts. This requires the shifts to start and end at the same time. Once the calendars are in sync, we can derive the scheduling workload from work centers.

For example, if the work center requires three resource units for each shift, we can determine that three workers are required for each of the shift in the schedule for corresponding department and scheduling group. This will also help obtain a schedule once it's generated for a given day and a shift for manufacturing execution.

Let us see a demo on how we will set up Workforce Structures we discussed earlier. We will briefly look at department setup. Then we will see how jobs and scheduling groups are managed. We will also review worker assignments. Departments and jobs are essential to define worker assignments and can be accessed from Workforce Structures task under My Client Groups.

I have created an SCM drilling department which would correspond to drilling work center in my plant. A department used for scheduling of a manufacturing plant must share the same location as that of the plant. Jobs are required for workers to be scheduled. And they must be associated to scheduling groups. Scheduling groups can be created by schedule administrators using the task Manage Common Lookups, and using the lookup code ORA_PER_SCHEDULING_GROUP.

I have created scheduling groups that model two types of labor resources. Only workers with active assignments to the job and department are considered to be scheduled. In this page, we can see drilling department has list of eligible workers who have drilling related jobs. As soon as the assignment is given to the employee, they are set up for scheduling.

To recap, we saw that departments and jobs with scheduling groups must be defined as part of worker assignments for scheduling to function properly. Now, we will perform the steps required to set up and enable workforce scheduling for manufacturing. We will walk through how to perform workforce scheduling, initial setup, how shifts and schedule generation profiles are managed.

We will learn about work patterns. Then we will perform supply chain admin tasks to set up facility schedules with shifts mapping. Finally, we will enable the plant for scheduling.

To enable this integration, scheduling method must be set to scheduling group. You will need to perform this using the provided rest URL to send the parameter value mentioned. I am performing this as a schedule administrator user.

I can manage shifts from workforce scheduling landing page under My Client Groups. The shifts are defined to match the start and end times of the shifts used in the manufacturing plant. This is very important for the integration of calendar. Schedule generation profile contains the scope and attributes of schedules in the organization. Let us review that in detail.

Under Schedule Plan, the cycle of schedule and workweeks are defined. You can also specify opening and closing of scheduling window for each cycle. Under operating shifts, the shifts managed in the schedule are defined. This must correspond to all the shifts that are operational in the plant calendar.

Under Schedulers and Staffing, I have provided production supervisors and schedulers and a list of all staffing departments. This should be all the departments that operate in the calendar. If there are departments that use an override calendar, you can define a separate schedule generation profile and add these departments to that profile.

Under Workforce Scheduling, work patterns are managed for each worker. This is also required for scheduling to assign the worker. Scheduling assigns workers to a shift only based on availability of the worker specified in this work pattern. I am ready to start setting up my plant calendars. I have navigated to manage facility schedules tasks from Setup and Maintenance. And I'm searching for the calendar used by the plant.

When editing the calendar, I can map this calendar to a schedule generation profile. This requires that all the shifts mentioned in operating shifts match with facility shifts, with same start and end times. This mapping cannot be removed once it is done.

I navigated to manage facility shifts task from Setup and Maintenance. There, I can look at the shifts used in the plant. They are shifts associated to the plant calendar. And the shifts with same start and end times are set up as operating shifts in schedule generation profile earlier.

The shifts have been automatically associated with the HCM enterprise shift. We are ready to turn on scheduling for this plant using the parameter. Use HCM Workforce Scheduling now that the shifts, profiles, and facility calendars are mapped properly. This concludes the setup for this feature.

To recap, we set scheduling mode to use scheduling groups. Work pattern must be specified for each worker for scheduling to function properly. We reviewed HCM enterprise shifts and covered the details of schedule generation profile. We mapped the profiles to facility schedule and supply chain. We enabled scheduling for a plant using plant parameters.

We will see a step by step demo of how Workforce Scheduling is used in the production supervisor Workbench. First, we will see how manufacturing engineers can manage resource availability in production setup. Then we will see how we can publish workloads to workforce scheduling. We will see how schedulers will generate schedules for supervisors, and how the supervisors can view schedules for a period of time, manage schedules and changes based on worker availability, and finally, using the published schedules to make workstation assignments.

I am logged in as a manufacturing engineer. Using manufacturing resources and work centers, I will first define the scheduling mappings. The mappings are available only after the plant parameter for scheduling is enabled.

I will map this resource by clicking the Edit action. A resource is mapped to a scheduling group, which I can select from this drop down. Here, I am mapping the resource for drilling to the corresponding scheduling group that was defined for such jobs. If this feature is enabled, resource instances will be no longer visible.

Similarly, I can map work centers using the Edit action work centers map to departments. I can select from the list of departments which share the location with the manufacturing organization. I am mapping to the department that correspond to this work center.

Going to View Details will let me view the work center capacity. If you use override calendars, they must be mapped to schedule generation profiles as well. All the resources, work centers, and work center calendars must be mapped, and resource shift units must be defined for each shift.

24-hour resource units will not be utilized for schedule planning. Here, I can see the units of resources required for each shift in this work center. I can manage this using the Edit Shift Units action. In this drawer, the units can be adjusted. This will be utilized to calculate the workloads for schedule generation.

The next step is to publish workloads. I navigated to schedule processes page under Tools and searched for the job Publish Production Workloads to HCM Workforce Scheduling. Work centers and resources that are not mapped to the corresponding departments and scheduling groups will not be used to determine workload requirements.

This job is run for one organization at a time. The end date determines the date to which the workloads will be sent. After the workloads are published, schedules can be created for this organization.

A scheduler will periodically generate the schedules ahead of time. This can only be performed by users with schedule manager role. Schedulers can make overrides such as adding assignments, creating or deleting open shifts, and removing assignments before publishing.

As a supervisor user, I can launch the Production Supervisor Workbench to access the available schedules. I can open the Manage Workforce Schedule action from the Monitoring tab. I am able to see published schedules for the department that correspond to my work center.

One of the operators, Adam, has a conflict. And Allen has agreed to swap shifts with him. Let us edit the schedule to swap their shifts. First, I will click the unassigned action to remove both of them from their shifts. If I wanted to add new operator, I can use Edit action to replace.

In this case, I just want to swap the two. Then I will schedule Allen to the 2:00 PM shift and Adam to the 10:00 PM shift by dragging the shifts. I can also see visually that these are overridden. This allows me to make changes in my shift due to unplanned reasons.

From Monitoring tab, I can open a workstation to start assigning operators to it. Manage Operator Assignment now presents me with a list of operators that are already scheduled and available. Now that I have scheduled Allen to 2:00 PM shift, I am able to assign him to this workstation.

To recap, we walked through setup of resource availability at work centers and published our workloads for scheduling. Once the scheduler had generated the schedules, we saw how a production supervisor is able to view, edit, and utilize these schedules to plan for operator availability and perform workforce assignments. This concludes the demonstration for this feature. Thank you for watching.