Resource Allocation in Manufacturing

Zena60

Hello,

I am curious if anyone has tried to use Resource Allocation for capacity planning in manufacturing.  Our projects are long term releases against blanket orders and I would like to use the Project Sheet to view where Production/Manufacturing resources are over-allocated and prove the need for additional staffing or tooling.   

I created fake "assigned to" e-mails to represent each production function.  Each function, depending on the volume, may require 1, or up to10, staff.  I use one column to calculate the number of production hours using a VLOOKUP to a separate "Rate" sheet.  That formula is then divided by 7 hours to define the number of single shift working days.

My question is more about how Smartsheet tabulates the overall pool of resources so I can confirm my Gantt chart is accurate.  I have created sheets for several large jobs with quantity releases that span the course of several months.  The Project Resource View will tell me when timing overlaps, creating an over-allocation alert.  This would be based on one person/resource production@xxxxxx.com, working 7 hours a day, 5 days per week, according to my current settings.   However, if I simply decrease the number of Duration days, Smartsheet has no idea that I am now using 3 people to make that happen; 3 staff, not 1, are needed to complete the process on time.   As soon as I reduce the number of days required by increasing staff, Resource View, obviously, no longer sees an issue.

If anyone is using Smartsheet to monitor shop time capacity I would love to get an idea of know how this was set up.  At the moment, I am manually entering a ton of data and am the only one using Smartsheet.   I would like to avoid creating fake e-mails for every person in production and keying even more lines to duplicate a task entry so I can assign personnel.  Perhaps that is the only way to approach the issue. 

Currently, we have no functioning scheduling system and Smartsheet seemed the best user friendly tool to look at the long running jobs.  However, it does seem a bit limited when it comes to manufacturing but I've been told many others use it for exactly that reason. 

Thank you.

 

Shaine Greenwood

Hello,

Our resource management functionality currently isn't designed for capacity planning. When you have a moment, please submit a Product Enhancement Request using the form under Quick links on the right of the community site and let our Product team know that you'd like to have this functionality added.

You might consider pursuing a more custom route as opposed to using the resource management functionality, possibly by using formulas that calculate this based on project time.

More information on our functions is available here: https://help.smartsheet.com/functions

You might even consider working with our consulting team to help develop a solution: https://www.smartsheet.com/consulting