Enhanced reporting capabilities for job shop scheduling software

After the redesign of our job shop scheduling software, of which I wrote in my last blog post, we now seem to get back to our "usual" way of shipping new versions in shorter intervals. On Tuesday, we enhanced the reporting capabilities of just plan it, and also improved the filtering in all template-related dialogues. This blog post is a quick round-up of all enhancements that are now live for all customers and users.

New reports added (master data reports)

The resource dialog now includes two new reports:

• Resource Report
• Template Report (for ENTERPRISE customers only)

These reports are meant to help you quickly export all data that you have in just plan it to Microsoft Excel so that you then can review. Whereas the Template Report shows you at one glance all information you defined per template, the Resource Report lists all resources and displays the work/ non-work intervals that you specified by day. The below screenshot shows you an example of the Template Report (grouped by template name; quick reminder: you can group any report by just dragging a column header to the area above the report).

Capacity Report now differentiating productive and non-productive times

Customers of our ENTERPRISE plan can schedule by different types of times (setup time, production time per unit, teardown time, transfer time). Within these four types of time, de facto just the production time should be regarded as productive time. This is now reflected in the Capacity Report, which distinguished between productive and non-productive times.

Enhanced Task Report

We added a couple of fields/ information to the Task Report. Namely, these are:

• Progress %
• Task note
• Sequence number

Added time pickers into reports

From now on, all date filters in all reports allow you to not just only filter by day, but also by the time. This gives you just more options in terms of the interval that you want to see in these reports.

Improved template filtering

Customers on the ENTERPRISE plan now can better filter on templates (if they have many) when they create a job and want to add a template to it. This is outlined in the short video below.

What we'll ship next

We already work on some smaller functional enhancements (especially with respect to the color schemes). In addition to this, we have two larger things under development:

1. Send-ahead/overlap functionality. With this, you will be able to define a task that starts after a certain quantity of the predecessor task is finished.
2. Shop-floor data integration. In a first step, this is the capability to mark a task and/or a job as complete and to (semi-)automatically update the schedule according to this real-live information from the shop-floor. But, this is just the first step. Ultimately, we see this turning into introducing a machine operator role, with the option to provide shop-floor data via a machine operator "app".

Do you want to contribute?

By the way: most of the above originates from ideas of our customers and users. So, please kindly share with us any idea you have to further enhance just plan it - either via email or in the comments section below.

Not yet using just plan it for an easy time and resource scheduling? Why not giving it a try. It is free for 30 days.