Setting Up the WIP Scheduler (Administrators)

The WIP Scheduler is the drag-and-drop production schedule board under Work In Progress → Scheduling → Schedule. It plans each job's recipe (BOM) operations onto your machines and people, respecting your working week and the dependencies between operations. This guide covers what to configure before your team starts using it. For day-to-day use, see Using the WIP Scheduler.

How it decides what can be scheduled

The board draws its lanes from your resources (machines and people marked as Scheduled), grouped by department. The jobs offered for planning come from each order's primary recipe (BOM): every operation line whose process is marked Scheduled, isn't complete, and isn't excluded from scheduling. That means the quality of the schedule depends directly on the setup below — an unticked process or a missing department doesn't cause an error, the work just quietly doesn't appear.

1. Set the working week

The working week drives everything: the grey night/weekend shading on the board, where operations are placed when a job is planned, and the capacity heatmap.

Open the Job Board (Work In Progress → Job Board), expand the Options panel in the left sidebar, and edit Work Hours: one start and end time per weekday, 24-hour format. Set both times to 00:00 to mark a day as non-working.

There is currently one working week for the whole site — per-machine shifts and public-holiday exceptions aren't supported yet, so holidays count as normal working days.

2. Set up departments and resources

Under Settings → Departments, create the departments your factory floor uses. Departments give the board its expandable group rows, its "unassigned bucket" lanes, the Department filter, and the capacity heatmap.

Under Settings → Resources, review every machine and person:

• Status — must be Scheduled for the resource to appear as a lane on the board. New resources default to Not-Scheduled.
• Department — assign one to every scheduled resource. A resource with no department sits ungrouped at the top of the board, has no department bucket, and is left out of the capacity heatmap.
• Employee — link person-type resources to their employee record.

3. Mark processes as Scheduled

Only operations whose process is marked Scheduled can be planned. Set this either way:

• Settings → Processes — tick the Schedule column checkbox in the grid; or
• open the process (Edit) and tick the Scheduled checkbox next to Active.

4. Tell the scheduler how each process runs (optional)

In the process editor's Scheduling section, set Max continuous segment (h):

• Leave it blank for operations that run continuously through nights and weekends once started — curing, drying, outsourced work. They're planned as one unbroken block.
• Enter a value for hands-on operations. The planner then splits long runs into one segment per working day, each no longer than this many hours and never running past the end of the shift; the rest resumes the next working day.

5. Set default dependencies between processes (recommended)

Dependencies control the order operations cascade in and the gaps between them. In the process editor, the Process Dependencies grid defines reusable defaults between pairs of processes: the direction, the type (FS finish-to-start, SS start-to-start, FF finish-to-finish), a minimum lag and a preferred lag in hours.

When a user first plans a job, its operations are seeded from these defaults; if no defaults match, the operations are simply chained one after another in recipe order. Users can then adjust the links per job in the scheduler's Edit Dependencies window — and promote a job's links back into defaults with Save as defaults, so the library can be built up from real jobs rather than configured up front.

6. Check your time estimates

Each operation's planned duration comes from its time values on the recipe: an override time if one is set, otherwise the estimated time, otherwise the predicted time. An operation with no time anywhere is planned as a token 15-minute bar — if you see suspiciously short bars, the estimates are missing on the recipe, not wrong in the scheduler.

Who can use it

Any user who can log in and open the Work In Progress area can use the Schedule page — there is currently no separate role or permission for planning, committing or unscheduling work. All changes are recorded against the user who made them.

Why isn't a job in the Unscheduled list?

A job appears in the Unscheduled panel while it has at least one operation that can be scheduled but isn't yet on the board (as a draft or committed event). If a job you expect is missing, check in order:

Things worth knowing

• Capacity warnings never block anything. The heatmap and the amber over-capacity outlines are advisory — the floor manager decides. Capacity assumes a standard 8-hour shift per resource per working day.
• Dependencies are advisory too. The board shows violated links in red or amber but never moves or blocks events automatically.
• Draft plans are safe. Planning a job creates draft events that aren't part of the schedule until committed; cancelling a draft never touches committed work.
• Per-user view settings live in the browser. Auto-save vs manual save, department tree mode, department summaries and the column filters are remembered per user, per computer — they aren't site settings.
• The Job Board is still there. The new scheduler runs alongside the existing Job Board; the working week is shared between them.