For a production schedule that deals with tens of machines and that receives tens of new production orders every day, the readability and the user-friendly browsing of the schedule are essential.
For this purpose, Direct Planning Industry features a set of tools to ease browsing and editing the schedule.
Browsing the schedule
Browsing the schedule in a video:
Time scales
Direct Planning offers 5 time scales that let you view from one day to several weeks at a glance. The zoom level of these time scales can be customized.
Mouse-scrolling and keyboard shortcuts
To quickly move within the schedule, you would often scroll using the mouse wheel and the many keyboard shortcuts. Here are a few examples of keyboard shortcuts:
- Go to the current date.
- Browse the jobs of current range: first, last, previous or next.
- Go to selected job.
Global browsing
Global browsing displays a miniature version of the schedule. Clicking in this window enables quick access to a given date.
Locating jobs
The Locator function allows you to find jobs quickly. Searching relies on date or status criteria, or on advanced criteria leveraging your custom data (e.g. to find a job based on the tools that are used).
You can also retrieve search criteria by selecting a job, in order to get a list of similar jobs (e.g. to find all the jobs whose customer is the same as for the selected job).
Multiple search criteria can be combined to refine results.
Highlighting jobs
Job highlighting is a very convenient feature of Direct Planning Industry. It lets you visually highlight a set of jobs that meet a given criterion in the schedule. Jobs that don’t meet this criterion are grayed out.
A few examples:
- Jobs of the same customer, or the same order
- Jobs of the same range (interlinked)
- Jobs with alert, delayed jobs
It is then possible to very quickly browse among the highlighted jobs. Ideal for browsing the jobs of a range or rapidly scrolling through the delayed jobs.
Filtering jobs
In the same spirit as the highlighting that grays out jobs not meeting a criterion, the “Filter” feature enables removing them from the current display. Thus, only the jobs meeting the selected criterion remain on screen.
Displaying the current route
The Current route function enables you to instantly retrieve the route from a selected job.
A window will display the list of other jobs in the route. This window will show various information about these jobs (machine, status, start and end dates, …) and you will be able to perform different actions, such as highlighting the jobs in the schedule or quickly modifying their progress state.
Direct Planning Industry – Current route
Editing a schedule: a few common actions
Some common actions of schedule editing in a video:
Drag and drop
Moving jobs with ease is one of the basic principles of Direct Planning. The schedule controller simply moves the jobs with the mouse, and the planning assistance automatically rearranges the schedule in compliance with the time constraints and range constraints.
Rescheduling jobs
The “Reschedule” feature is very useful in everyday’s life. For example, it takes one click to reschedule a job or a range in 24 hours, in one week or on a given date.
Changing machine
For a given operation, Direct Planning Industry manages the notion of compatible machine. When moving a job onto a compatible machine, the software is able to automatically recalculate setting and running times under the same technical conditions.
Subdividing a job
The software features job subdivision, which lets you postpone the manufacturing of a certain amount of product, or semi-finished product. This feature also enables you to parallelize production, loading another machine with part of the production.
Scheduling via lists
Planning with lists offers the ability to schedule jobs via vertical drag and drops in a special list, complementing the standard Gantt chart:
Direct Planning Industry – Planning with lists