Capacity Planning based on Work Order
ERP Next’s Capacity Planning assists manufacturers in effectively monitoring and managing production jobs' allocation to various workstations. By analyzing available resources and scheduling operations, ERPNext optimizes production without causing any workstation overload.
This facility gives transparency on operation timelines, utilization of machines, and aids in taking intelligent production decisions to prevent delays or bottlenecks.
Operation:
To set up operations needed in the production process, proceed to: Manufacturing → Bill of Materials → Operations Each operation must be one specific task or step in the process to produce the final product. In the operations form, set up the default workstation, time per unit, and cost per hour. These settings are utilized in scheduling and cost calculation when attached to a BOM.
Workstation:
Add each workstation in ERPNext from: Manufacturing → Bill of Materials → Workstation In the workstation master, identify what operations can be performed, the cost to run the operations per hour and working hours (with a holiday list or own working schedule).
You may also give the size of the production capacity which limits the number of operations that can be run simultaneously. Under this arrangement, realistic scheduling and monitoring utilization is easier.
Bill of Materials (BOM):
In the BOM, you can associate operations and their respective workstations, besides defining raw materials. Each operation is defined sequentially with the estimated time and workstation so that ERPNext can realize the complete production routing.
Bringing routing into the BOM facilitates the planning of detailed production and aids in capacity analysis at the time of creating work orders.
Work Order:
When a Work Order is submitted, ERPNext creates Job Cards of each itemized operation of the BOM. The Job Cards are displayed against the provided workstations in accordance with availability and working hours.
The system also produces timesheets to measure actual hours taken versus planned time and therefore, it is possible to monitor accurately the performance and labor cost. This gives clarity to implementation and helps in the examination of efficiency and delays.
Error due to Capacity Planning:
Capacity Planning in ERPNext ensures that every operation in a Work Order is planned considering workstation availability and set working hours. While submitting a Work Order, you can get an error if ERPNext cannot schedule one or more of the operations as per these restrictions.
This generally happens when the planned operation duration is more than the total working hours available in the assigned workstation.
Question: On Work Order Submission, we are receiving following error message.
This error indicates that ERPNext is not able to assign the operations specified in the BOM to the chosen workstation(s) during the current working hours.
This occurs when the time of an operation is more than the daily working capacity of the workstation. Each operation has to start and finish on the same day when scheduling jobs through the capacity planning engine in ERPNext.
Role Desk Permission
Make sure users who are working with Work Orders and Workstations have the appropriate roles and permissions set. Roles like Manufacturing User or Manufacturing Manager must be able to create and edit Work Orders, Workstations, BOMs, and see the corresponding reports. These permissions can be set under Role Permission Manager.
Answer:
Verify whether the Working Hours have been properly defined in the Workstation master. This is a requirement for ERPNext to be able to schedule operations correctly during the submission of the Work Order. If working hours are either absent or insufficient, the system cannot allocate an operation covering more than one hour to the available daily time slot. Correct the working hours or utilize a suitable holiday list to present a realistic set of operation times, and then resubmit the Work Order.
When a Work Order is posted, ERPNext assigns the operations (as defined in the associated BOM) to the concerned workstations. The system attempts to book every operation in a single working day. If the duration of any operation is more than the working hours available for that day, ERPNext will raise a capacity planning error and ask the user to break the operation into smaller units. Breaking the operation guarantees that it can be scheduled within workstation availability constraints.
If you’ve already configured the working hours but are still encountering this issue, it's likely that an individual operation's estimated time is too high to fit within a single working day. In such cases, break down the operation into smaller sub-operations, which can be sequentially scheduled and completed in parts across the workstation's timeline.
Avoid Working Hours of Workstation:
If you wish to enable overtime scheduling outside of the normal working hours of a workstation, i.e., make it possible to work overtime, you can click the "Allow Overtime" checkbox in the Manufacturing Settings. If you do so, ERPNext will not limit the operation allocation according to the workstation's pre-defined working hours, giving more flexibility while scheduling jobs.
