Human resources planning

The Settings -> Human resources -> Planning page shows the maximum number of workers required for each department in each day (if operations are assigned to departments). For example:

	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3	Day 4
Department 1	10	12	8	10
Department 2	10	10	10	9

This number is calculated as follows:

if there is a job that is assigned to a department, then one worker is needed to perform the operation;
if there is another job assigned to the same department, and it starts after the previous job is finished, then one worker is enough to perform both operations;
if the other job starts before the previous job is finished, then two workers are needed to perform both operations.

Technically, this number shows the maximum number of parallel operations that are assigned to one department on that day. Which means, in essence, that if workers cannot perform two operations at once, then the same number of workers is required for the day - or else, the production plan cannot be satisfied.

This allows understanding of how to allocate workers when the production is constrained by the number of available skilled workers.

Jump to:

How to plan human resources in production?

When scheduling production, then the order of priorities is almost always the following:

First priority: availability of materials.
Second priority: availability of workstations capacity.
Third priority: availability of workers.

Why so? Because:

Material availability is difficult or impossible to negotiate. If you do not have it, you cannot make the product.
Many machines' and workstations' equipment is much more expensive and the uptime is more valuable (i.e. productive) than labor hours. Hence these assets should be loaded as much as possible.
The workers resource can be most easily rescheduled, workers could be negotiated, possibly re-assigned to another department or re-trained. Or when needed, extra shifts could be introduced.

This means that:

It is more important to schedule optimal loading for workstations and try to fill the departments for each day.
As a second option, reschedule the manufacturing orders when available workers cannot be gathered.
If this happens constantly, some workstations might need to be closed to prevent the issue.

Because of this, in MRPeasy by default, the production scheduling:

first looks for material availability (based on the BOM),
then schedules workstation's capacity (based on the Routing),
and then assigns the default workers from the Routing or the workstations' details to the operation (without considering workers' capacity).

It might feel comfortable trying to schedule workers as 'workstations' in higher priority than workstations, but in reality, this will yield poorer effectiveness, productivity and workstation loading, which will directly and negatively affect the lead time of the products, customer satisfaction, and revenue. The primary focus needs to be to perform works in an optimal tight schedule, and negotiating workers availability before rescheduling the orders.

How to optimize production scheduling, if there's not a constant number of required skilled workers?

Re-scheduling is always a headache, so it's better to avoid it, if possible. The answer in many cases is to keep open an optimal amount of workstations in the software for scheduling, which would correspond to the average number of skilled workers available.

Then your capacity planning and lead time estimation will be in broad terms reasonably accurate.

Technically, this means that you might schedule only 5 workstations of Welders for each day,

but on some days 2 welders will show up, and you will fall behind schedule these days;
and on other days 8 welders will show up, and you will catch up these days.

How to do that, read tips from here: What is a workstation group?