Workshop capacity

[Simon Wakefield]

I've only just started using Microsoft Project and would like to know if its
possible for me to set out my companys workload.

We have 3 workshops with a certain amount of man hours avaiable per week.
Normally there are 1840hrs per week avaiable. I want to be able to assign a
task per week that use these hours. So for example one task would take 300
hours to complete. Each task has a date it starts and when it must completed
by. From this I want to able to map out our capacity each week and produce a
weekly chart of the current work load for the week, and also produce another
chart showing the yearly overview. Would this software be able to show when I
have used too many hours or not enough?

Each task need to have 3 defined areas to it. Drawings income and
processing, fabrication, painting. The fabrication is where the man hours
come into it, but the other two do not use workshop capacity. These are just
important points for the task.

At the moment I produce all this in excel. If anyone is intresting in help
me I would happily email them my excel sheet so you can get a better idea of
what i'm trying to show.

Thank you, any comments would be useful.

 

[davegb]

I've only just started using Microsoft Project and would like to know if its
possible for me to set out my companys workload.

We have 3 workshops with a certain amount of man hours avaiable per week.
Normally there are 1840hrs per week avaiable. I want to be able to assign a
task per week that use these hours. So for example one task would take 300
hours to complete. Each task has a date it starts and when it must completed
by. From this I want to able to map out our capacity each week and produce a
weekly chart of the current work load for the week, and also produce another
chart showing the yearly overview. Would this software be able to show when I
have used too many hours or not enough?

Each task need to have 3 defined areas to it. Drawings income and
processing, fabrication, painting. The fabrication is where the man hours
come into it, but the other two do not use workshop capacity. These are just
important points for the task.

At the moment I produce all this in excel. If anyone is intresting in help
me I would happily email them my excel sheet so you can get a better idea of
what i'm trying to show.

Thank you, any comments would be useful.

Project can certainly do this, with some tweaking. Personally, I prefer
to use software specifically designed to do the task at hand. It sounds
to me like you're doing production scheduling more than actual
projects. I just Googled for "Production scheduling software" and got a
number of hits. At the very least, compare their capabilities with
Project's and try to estimate how much time it would take you to adapt
Project to your needs vs. the up front cost of specialty software.
Project is primarily designed to schedule "projects" using Critical
Path Method scheduling. A project being defined as "A problem scheduled
for solution". Meaning, it has a clear cut start and end date.
Essentiallly, you create a schedule by entering a detailed list of
tasks, estimated durations for each task, and then creating "links"
between the tasks. A link reflects one task's dependency on another. In
other words, I can't paint the wall until I put the wall up. I can't
put the wall up until I've done the framing, electrical and plumbing.
Once properly set up, the software tells you which of the many paths
through the list of tasks in the longest, the one that determines the
overall duration of the project. That's called the "Critical Path" in
scheduling parlance. This information can be used to help prioritize
within the project and to manage and control it. To this can be added
resource assignments and costs to determine when you have resource
shortages and what it will cost to do the entire project. There are
additional bells and whistles too numerous to mention here.
In your case, it seems your concerns are more directly related to
capacity planning on an ongoing basis. This is NOT a project. It sounds
like a match at first glance, but my guess is you'll find yourself at
cross purposes with the software if you choose Project.
Hope this helps in your world.

 

[John Sitka]

Capacity is a RATE. Work load can be low AND Capacity can be low at the same time.
If you were to build cabinets and each cabinet requires painting but you only have one painter
and he can only paint one cabinet an hour. Your workshop could produce 2 cabinets a hour
but can only paint 1. Cabinets out the back door can only be one per hour.
So there is no Chart per se. It's a single rate calculation of the bottleneck of the system.
The 1840 hrs is meaningless number, you may only use 900 of those a week or you may use
all of them but that is just a measure of localized work center performance, not capacity.

So how to solve?
You need to break down each workshop deliverable into it's set of task and assign resources to them.
One resource will be operating continuously with no breathing room*. Increase the performance of that resource
and your capacity will go up. Simple but requires detailed data collection. When you go shopping for
software, the data collection implimentation is the part of the problem that is kind of like the crazy
aunt nobody like's to talk about because it's difficult to impliment on short task durations. All the fancy
UI stuff can't do it's job well without that data collection, because the calculations of bottlenecks
will be based on assumptions.

*breathing room, wait states, down time, lag. The lingo isn't important, it is simply the fact that a different resource
could accomplish more if asked to do so. Be aware that these time "wasters" bounding other tasks have a unique
way of being removed or used up through work inefficencies, prior expectations or beauracracy.
So the true bottleneck can be tough to find.