We will only be varying our schedule on Friday December 25 (we will be closed). Thursday and Saturday we will observe normal business hours (10am to 7pm).

Hey everyone, just an update on scheduling: there will be no lessons December 24, 25, 26, 31, and January 1. There are lessons scheduled for December 28, 29, 30, and January 2.

If there are lessons on your regular day, please come – we really need the help! If you’d like to come help barn staff care for the horses, come any day 7-9 am or 3-5 pm.

See you soon, and have a safe and happy holiday season!

You would think that since everything is in reruns I would have finished my Christmas shopping! I am “unofficially” finished. I’m looking forward to spending time with my family – in front of, and away from the TV. For me, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without The Christmas Story. And there are about 5 books that I’d like to finish.

Occasionally, technical difficulties arise and in this case we had no ability to record sound this week so these meeting notes will be brief and perhaps a bit muddled.

We started the meeting discussing the schedule for the coming weeks. We have next Monday off for the holidays and resume our previous meeting schedule in January (every other Monday we have a general team meeting, and every other Thursday we have a design specific meeting).

Our next playtest will be in the Spring, and during Summer we will be having an open Alpha playtest for KSBs 1-4. We’re aiming for the end of April for finalizing the team multiplayer design.

Basic Multiplayer guidelines so far:

• Teams of 4
• Earthquake leaves the 4 finalists stranded in a camp
• Random materials will be strewn about the campsite which can be used to craft a shelter
• The shelter must be sturdy and warm enough to keep the finalists alive for 3 days, and big enough to fit all players and their gear

The design team then detailed a working plot scenario that ties all these points together.

Team Activites to be performed by the players in the multiplayer portion:

1. Determine “foot print” (size and shape of shelter)
2. Team agrees on a shape and size
3. Hunt for materials & bring them back to the campsite
4. Scan materials for the best insulation
5. Agree on materials
6. Re-analyze shelter design to compensate for snow load
7. Re-adjust shelter build as necessary
8. Re-analyze shelter design to compensate for wind
9. Re-adjust shelter build as necessary

Once the design team completed the run-through of the initial multiplayer design, the entire group discussed details of gameplay and what is possible to achieve within Virtools.

There was also talk about including a physical notebook with the game so students could use it for calculations/sketching/note taking. On one hand, designing the multiplayer around the use of physical notebooks restricts the game to be local multiplayer only since it is very difficult to share something like that purely online. On the other, given our current research goals local multiplayer is what we need to focus on.

After talking about the multiplayer gameplay for a while, we realized that KSB 4 can be simplified dramatically to support the activities being performed in the multiplayer portion. The meeting finished up with us still hashing out the details for shelter design, construction, and temperature.

Scheduling software systems, both finite and infinite, need to take into account both setup time and cycle time.   One of the most difficult aspects of scheduling is creating an accurate estimating of what the cycle time may be for a process.   If you estimate for the cycle time is not accurate your scheduling system will not be accurate.  There are many factors which affect the cycle time which are not fixed including skill level of the person running the machine, reliability of the machine, maintenance of the machine, inspection of the parts being run, the quality of the material and others.

Cycle time is defined as the handling time + run time.

Handling time is the time spent as the operator loads and unloads the part being manufactured from the machine.

Run time is the time the operator spends at the machine running the part or the time the machine is running by itself, i.e. a cnc machine.    Some operations require the operator to be present during the running of the part and others do not.

When scheduling software is calculating resource requirements it is not usually differentiating the handling and run time but there are situations where this should be addressed.   If the run time is very lengthy and a machine is running it independently then the only resources being consumed is the machine and not the employee.   The employee would only be involved in the handling of the material to load and unload the machine.  In this situation the scheduling software may actually scheduling the job shop differently then if it was only looking at machine resources.   The scheduling software needs to be able to schedule both the handling time and the run time which is the cycle time.

Estimating your cycle times is a critical area for any manufacturer to be profitable and also to have an accurate schedule.    Cost estimating MIE Solutions provides software to help you do this calculations as efficiently as possible through their MRP/ERP systems quoting package.

http://www.mie-solutions.com/mie/index.php/MIE-Trak/

http://www.mie-solutions.com/mie/

Who knows? This is likely my last cycle doing this. But here goes. Spring scheduling has officially started.

Juniors turned in elective preferences and college preferences Wednesday and Thursday. And seniors had small-group planning meetings all day today.

There may still be time to revise… but the college will likely get locked in fast.

If you are among the 14 seniors or 8 juniors who have not met with me… you know.

Sophomores, freshmen, your schedules stay the same.

Except seminar. Everyone picks new seminars. Even me.

(wandering campus?  children’s literature?)

We recently completed a major expansion for a customer relationship in Charlotte, NC. A regular shopper at the store sent me this note: “You guys were invisible. Every week during the project I would shop there and things just seemed to change. I never noticed who was doing the changing.”

I didn’t expect such a nice unsolicited note. This job was the 800-pound gorilla of all projects. It covered 130,000 square feet and none of the four walls were square with each other. We expanded in three directions, with tight site conditions on two sides. Relocation of utilities had to take place, the store had to stay open and the adjoining tenants had to remain satisfied.

The store remained open seven days a week and their sales actually increased during this time. (We were thrilled since it’s every contractor’s nightmare to be blamed for a decline of revenue.)

Our project manager offered these takeaways for success:

• Take a holistic approach from design to construction. Promote clear and constant communications with everyone involved.

• Be aggressive and detailed with scheduling. Retrofits and open-store remodels will take much more hands-on work to be successful.

• Work hand-in-glove with the municipality and constantly be thinking when working through inevitable challenges.

• Create temporary offices and customer service areas to foster good customer relationships.

• Make use of 2nd or 3rd shifts when performing demolition as to not disturb the adjoining business or tenants. Surrounding tenants can shut you down with complaints in a second flat.

• Be aware of security needs. Add an additional guard at key times to keep the project moving rather than bottleneck construction to one door at a time.

• Make it look like you aren’t there. Be invisible to customers and surrounding businesses.

• Maintain routine communications whether you’re sharing the good, the bad or the ugly.

• Take total ownership in the process. Never be afraid to admit a mistake.

• Make extra efforts to keep everything clean during the process. You’ll produce a better quality product and ensure project safety.

________________________________________________

Merrill Stewart is Founder and President of the Stewart Perry Company, a commercial building contractor based in Birmingham, Ala. Contact him via email.

I’ve been waiting long enough! Now- I finally received the final SHOVE from a friend whom I have photographed on numerous occasions.

I will be scheduling queen bee boudoir photo shoots for January!

Remember back in November when the Fan alerted you to the inequity in the SEC scheduling of bye weeks? [You can re-read the post here]

Here’s the deal (quoting from the previous post):

Since 2007, Alabama has played over 3 times as many teams coming off an open date week than any other team in the SEC. In fact Alabama has played as many such games as LSU, Tennessee, Florida, and Vanderbilt combined! The Tide has played 17 teams who had two weeks to rest and prepare for them. The second place team (LSU) played only 5 teams who had an extra week during the same period. Georgia, Auburn, Kentucky, Ole Miss, Miss St., Arkansas, and South Carolina combined only played 10 games against opponents coming off a bye week!

This year Alabama played three teams who were coming off an open date (Tennessee, Mississippi State and Auburn) and if you’re thinking, “Huh, two of those teams gave the Tide their toughest games of the year,” you’d be thinking what I’m thinking.

Now, you might think that this was just some strange glitch in the scheduling that would be corrected this coming year and in the years ahead. You’d think that, right?

Well, think again. Next year Alabama plays SIX teams who will have two weeks to rest up and prepare for them. Their last six SEC games will be played against teams coming off a bye week (South Carolina, Ole Miss, Tennessee, LSU, Mississippi State and Auburn). That’s six SEC games in a row against teams who will have had an extra week of rest and preparation.

Something’s wrong.

And that’s why Mal Moore has requested the conference to review its scheduling practice. Something needs to be done about this — and it needs to be done now.

Most projects can be broken down into discrete stages. These stages are then able to be accomplished by either a specialist trained in that area, such as purchasing or construction, or it will at least allow you to retain some control over the project if you are performing all the steps yourself.

I won’t be discussing scheduling at this point, as that is a whole science in itself. I have broken down a project life cycle into seven separate parts, but I will talk about the first one last. Trust me, there’s a reason behind this…

2) Once a project has become a reality, the first steps are crucial, since they will determine the scope and detail of your project. The initial designs and plans will set the stage for the life of the project. Bad plans, bad project… good plans, good project! It only makes sense, but you would be surprised at the number of people who are not willing to take the time, effort and expense of having a good coordinated set of documents to start.

3) While designing and permitting your project, you should be estimating the costs by finalizing  your bids and contracting for the individual scopes of work. (We will discuss Scopes of Work in a future blog) This will allow you to get good hard numbers and also control your risk of future cost increases by contracting the work right now. It also doesn’t allow you to capture any savings if prices should go down, but I don’t think we will be seeing that again in the future.

4) During the purchasing process, it is critical to let each separate contractor have input into the schedule and also to have the schedule as a part of the contract itself. This gives the contractor some ownership of the project process and eliminates any disagreements over time for each task in the schedule.

5) By now you should have your project planned, approved, scheduled and purchased. Now you can start the actual project itself! This is where budget and schedule control are critical, and if you have proper documents and scopes of work, there shouldn’t be too many items that were left out of the original contracting. If each contractor performs according in the timeframe that they requested in the schedule and for the cost that they are contracted for, everything should come out perfect. But we all know that is never the case and there is always an unforeseen circumstance, or several, with weather being a prime culprit.

After the initial mobilization, intelligent and hands on oversight of the process is the key. There must be weekly meetings, submittals, approvals, permits, etc. and every step of the process requires someone to make sure that everything goes according to plan. A single point of responsibility is the best approach, because design by committee gets you an Edsel!

6) As the project approaches completion, there is a separate complicated process for project closeout. This is when all the various final approvals by State, Federal, County and City agencies need to be obtained. This part of the process should be an ongoing part of the actual project implementation, so that there are no surprises at the end of the project. All warranties, replacement parts, manuals, documentation and as-built final plans must be obtained while the contractors and design team are still engaged in the project.

7) Now the project actually starts to operate. All the little bugs and items that were ignored now come to light and a “punch list” of corrections needs to be made and the contractors held accountable for repairing these items, within reason. The end users, owner or lessee, now takes control and needs to be made happy if you ever want to do another project again. Anything that you think you will ever need to document this project, now is the time to get it, while everything is still fresh on everyone’s mind

1) And now back to the beginning… project concept and acquisition, or better yet, “Who pencils the deal?” It is a constant balancing act to reduce the costs and time so that the project pro forma shows a profit. But sometimes the person making the deal doesn’t have enough background in the nuts and bolts of actually completing the project to make accurate assumptions. And then the deal goes south.

To eliminate this, it is essential to have informed input during the initial concept stage. And as the project progresses to actually getting financing, there has to be accurate information in the proposal. The bank will know if it is actually feasible, or you may have to convince them a little… But if there is real world input into the costs and schedules, backed up by written documentation from the contractors, there shouldn’t be a problem on the operations end of the deal. But forecasting final sales prices over a year in the future, now that is an art!

Hope you enjoyed my random ramblings, Fred

I ran across TweetMiner and was intrigued that it was a tool that could bring RSS news feeds in and allow single click tweets right from the content.  The goal is to search and mine for web content that you then easily share with followers.  Once again you become the micro-community search tool for your followers.

There is both a web and desktop client available and demo videos to help you grasp how it all works.  Adding a feed uses Google keyword search to build the feed and the you start bringing in news articles that can be instantly scheduled.  You may also schedule them for somewhere in the future.

Now there is a few plans, from free to Max with varying costs and features.  the number of feeds you can bring and and using your own bit.ly account are some of the things you end up paying for.  Free accounts are only allowed 5 searches to generate RSS while the Max gives unlimited.  You get the idea.

MIE Solutions offers a made to order job shop ERP system designed for the manufacturer of goods and products.  MIE Trak is a full featured ERP system for the made to order and engineer to order manufacturer.

Scheduling Machines For ERP Systems

Scheduling machines requires an initial understanding of the estimated hours jobs take to produce.   If you estimated hours for both setup and run are incorrect your scheduling system will only produce poor results.   The results of your scheduling system are based on how accurate your estimates are.

MIE Trak has an advanced scheduling system which includes both finite and infinite scheduling.  MIE Trak is designed for most any type of job shop include made to order and engineer to order production organizations. You can visit the website at

http://www.mie-solutions.com

Author : GUNAWAN, ALVARON

PP Payne Indonesia merupakan anak perusahaan dari PT. Filtrona Indonesia yang berlokasi di Jalan Rungkut Industri III/32. PP Payne Indonesia memproduksi filter dan dipasarkan ke industri-industri lokal maupun mancanegara. Kekacauan penjadwalan produksi yang selama ini dibuat secara manual sering terjadi disebabkan oleh keterbatasan kemampuan karyawan dalam memantau keseluruhan jadwal produksi dan hal-hal lain yang terkait. Hal ini mempengaruhi kinerja karyawan PP Payne Indonesia secara keseluruhan. Oleh karena itu, PP Payne Indonesia membutuhkan suatu sistem informasi penjadwalan produksi yang lebih efektif dan efisien daripada sistem manual yang selama ini dijalankan. Sistem informasi yang dibuat menitikberatkan pada kegiatan administrasi divisi production dan divisi sales yang meliputi kegiatan-kegiatan seperti penerimaan order, pembuatan order position, pembuatan production plan dan pembuatan production record beserta laporan-laporan yang terkait. Sistem informasi penjadwalan produksi ini dibuat menggunakan Macromedia Dreamweaver MX dan HTML sebagai penunjang interfacenya, memakai bahasa pemrograman PHP dan memakai fasilitas-fasilitas yang ada pada MySQL sebagai database server. Berdasarkan hasil pengujian dengan cara questionnair yang dibagikan kepada 4 orang manager dan 6 orang supervisor diperoleh kesimpulan bahwa sistem telah di desain dengan desain interface yang bagus dan mendapat respon dari user sebesar 83,33%, sistem ini telah di desain dengan user friendly sebesar 94,38%, cara sistem ini memproses data memperoleh respon sebesar 87,50%, dan nilai untuk sistem ini mendapat respon sebesar 91,88% dalam memenuhi kebutuhan user; sehingga user dapat memakai sistem ini dengan mudah. Dengan demikian dapat disimpulkan bahwa sistem informasi penjadwalan produksi dapat memenuhi kebutuhan yang ada.

Keyword : production scheduling information system, personal home page (php), scheduling, production

Sumber : http://repository.petra.ac.id/2908/

Author : SULISTIO, HARTONO

PT Alas Petala Makmur adalah sebuah perusahaan yang bergerak dalam industri moulding (pembentukan profil kayu). Pembentukan profil kayu berbagai ukuran bentuk dan jumlah yang dibuat berdasarkan pesanan dari pembeli (Job Order). Proses transformasi produksinya berdasarkan flowshop. Proses pembentukan suatu produk, tidak dilakukan secara kontinu ( terputus-putus ), sehingga terjadi banyak set up mesin. Satu order dari pembeli yang terdiri dari berbagai jenis ukuran produk, dapat dikirimkan apabila keseluruhan produk telah selesai dikerjakan. Penjadwalan perusahaan mengakibatkan waktu penyelesaian order menjadi semakin lama, walaupun order dapat terpenuhi. Usulan sistem penjadwalan mempertimbangkan pengurutan jobs dengan menggunakan Hybrid Genetic Algorithm, dilakukan juga penggabungan beberapa job berdasarkan kesamaan ukuran lebar setiap produk sehingga dapat meminimasi jumlah set up mesin yang berulang-ulang. Hasil perbandingan antara metode penjadwalan usulan dengan metode penjadwalan perusahaan/kondisi perusahaan adalah dengan metode penjadwalan usulan dengan mengurangi jumlah set up mesin yang berulang-ulang, pengurangan jumlah set up untuk produk solid sebanyak 2 kali dari 10 kali menjadi 8 kali, untuk produk finger joint sebanyak 4 kali dari 6 kali menjadi 2 kali, dan mengurangi waktu penyelesaian order (makespan), untuk produk solid sebesar 2.13% dan untuk produk finger joint sebesar 13.81% dari metode penjadwalan perusahaan.

Keyword : production engineering, scheduling, management, hybrid genetic algorithm, flowshop, makespan, set up machine

Sumber : http://repository.petra.ac.id/2806/