About Labor Planning

Labor planning allows you to specify the amount of time to be spent by labor (people, machines) on operations (segment, planned unit). These times are specified when you create/edit a route.

Labor plans can be exported/uploaded to external schedulers (including ERPs) to inform execution planning and scheduling decisions. Labor plans are not used by execution; however, labor records created during execution may be used to compare execution against plan along multiple dimensions, including operator, line, product, etc.

Labor Planning Types

Labor Planning Types are a set of fixed time categories used for labor planning.

There are four labor planning types for which times can be set:
  • Setup: Time to prepare a machine (e.g., tooling, warm-up, pressurization, adjustments, calibration) or operator (e.g., don PPE).
  • Run: Time to execute an operation.
  • Inspection: Time to inspect or test a lot at an operation.
  • Transport: Time to move a lot into, or out of, a work center; or bring material to a work center.

One labor planning type can be optionally linked to a labor type. Labor Planning Types are currently not user-extensible.

Basis

Labor Plans can be defined in terms of whether the value of time entered represents the time required to process/manufacture/carry out activities for a complete lot or for an individual item or a serial number. You can select either per item or per Lot as the Basis for each planning type. For example, Setup can be set to per Lot basis, whereas Run can be set to per item.

For each labor planning type, times can be set for a:
  • Lot: Time for the entire lot to be completed.
  • Item: Time to complete a single item in the lot.

Labor Plan Types

Labor Plan Types are a set of user-extensible categories that can be associated with labor codes. By default, the system provides the following labor plan types:

  • Machine
  • People
  • Miscellaneous

Additonally labor plan types can be added to the system using out of the box REST endpoints. For more information, refer to the API Endpoint Documentation.

Using REST APIs, additional Labor Types can be created and associated with Labor Planning Types.

Labor Codes

Labor codes are a set of scaling factors for each labor planning type that can be applied to a labor plan to generate another, calculated labor plan. Labor plan scaling factors limit the amount of configuration needed to generate multiple labor plans for a scheduler. A single scaling factor is a float - positive or zero - that is multiplied with a labor plan value to generate a new labor plan value. As such, a scaling factor of 1.0 means to use the planned value unchanged.