Scheduling basics

Planning Interval
The planning interval can be changed by clicking on the Schedule Menu.  To change the default planning interval select Company Settings,  Planning Interval. These settings are saved in your Visual APS profile and only apply to you
 

The planning interval in Visual APS defines the period of time where scheduling can occur. You cannot perform scheduling outside the planning interval. The planning interval is defined under the settings area in Visual APS and saved to the user's settings file. The Planning Interval can also be changed at any time by going to the Schedule menu and select Interval. By default, this is set to 12 weeks.  The interval for planning is visible in The Title Bar at the top of the Visual APS window along with the server name, database name, and date and time when the was was last loaded.

There are two primary methods of scheduling in Visual APS

Forward scheduling

• Forward scheduling takes a job order with a number of tasks and allocates those tasks to resources as early as possible, in other words when resources become available. There is also an option for Visual APS to schedule forward from a specific day.

Backward scheduling

• Backward scheduling takes a job order with a number of tasks and allocates those tasks to resources in reverse job orders, from last to first operation, and schedules the task on the resource.

You can either manually drag and drop a job order or an operation onto the schedule board or use the auto scheduling feature. 

You can only schedule a job order or an operation when there is sufficient resource capacity.  By default Visual APS will try to schedule the resources that are captured against the job order’s routing in Enterprise Resource Planning.  If insufficient resoures are available you may only be able to schedule the job rder partially or not at all.  It’s best to enable the schedule around function when you want to schedule an entire set of operations for an job order.  This will enable you to schedule all operations together. 

When using schedule around it is important to remember that operations will only be scheduled when there is available capacity. If you drag and drop operation 20 to a time on the schedule board which is right at the beginning of your planning interval, any operations that come before operation 20 will not be scheduled as these would need to be scheduled before the start of our planning interval.

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