Typically, scheduling with finite capacities, will often lead to idle times on machine centers and of course, for the sake of efficiency and cost cutting, everybody in planning wants to use their capacities to the fullest extent possible.
The function "Fill idle times" helps to avoid idle times on machine centers.
How it works
- The VAPS automatically creates a prioritized list of the production orders that are already assigned to machine centers, following the same strict priorization rules as in the "Add all" function.
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All operations are tried to be moved forward to avoid idle times.
- Already scheduled production orders are not getting pushed out (they are only squeezed in).
- The following settings can be made in the VAPS setup
- define the "schedule start" date
- decide whether you want to take into account EMAD
- specify the number of iterations
- When you start the scheduling process under "Actions -> Schedule", click the according option to determine whether you want to take into account alternate machine centers or not.
If you want to fill the idle times on a certain work/machine center only, select the according item from the center's context menu.