Configuring production workloads

MVS can generate employee schedules from planned workloads for the production of physical goods. Production workloads can be imported from external systems to WFM to facilitate the automatic generation of employee schedules. This is useful for customers in manufacturing that schedule employees who are responsible for producing products using specific machines.

How schedules are generated from production workloads

The schedule generation process begins when production plans are created in the system. Production plans can be created manually or imported from an external system. The ProductionPlanShiftGeneration job scheduler task identifies new production plans and generates schedules from them. The task matches the production plan to production templates that have the same combination of product and machine. For matching production templates, the task generates unassigned shifts from the associated shift templates that overlap the time range specified in the production plan. These unassigned shifts are typically assigned using Auto-Assignment, but can also be assigned by any other MVS feature.

Required components

These components are required to generate schedules from production workloads:
Machines and products

Customers must define machines and products to identify required production workloads. Machines are typically used in WFM to identify work centers, or areas within a worksite that perform particular operations. Machines are defined using the Maintenance > Shop Floor Data Capture > Machine maintenance form.

Products are typically used to represent physical goods that must be produced, such as a specific product SKU or part number. Products are defined using the Maintenance > Shop Floor Data Capture > Product maintenance form. In addition to their typical use case, products and machines can represent any resource or process that is required to obtain the required level of productivity. Customers can localize the corresponding maintenance forms to change their names as required.

When a combination of product and machine is used in a production plan, it represents a single unit of production workload. Customers must consider what level of productivity a single production workload equals. For example, one production workload could represent the production of 1000 units of a product SKU in a day. Additionally, customers must consider the level of staffing that is required to obtain that level of productivity.

Shift templates
Shift templates specify a set of shifts that are required for a team during a defined time period, for example a week. Shift templates can be associated with a product and machine combination using a production template.

For details on creating shift templates, see "Shift templates" in the Infor Workforce Management Multiview Scheduler User Guide.

Production templates
Production templates define a level of staffing required to produce a product on a specific machine. The production template does this by associating a shift template to a combination of product and machine.
Production plans
Production plans specify a time range when a product is scheduled to be produced using a specific machine. This is used as the basis for determining which production templates to generate shifts from and the times and dates for the generated shifts.