Advanced Sequencer

The Advanced Sequencer provides a quick view of labor demands for each station and each unit during each takt cycle throughout the day for high model-option variation environments. Production supervisors often struggle with daily order sequencing when part availability, quality, or production resource issues occur.

In addition, when units with many options are in production, they create labor challenges due to long cycle times. The Sequencer's charts make it easy to identify when and where potential issues could occur and where floating operators should be assigned. 

Station Utilization Chart
This chart provides a clear indication of which units will cause potential issues at which stations and at which times of the day. The chart can display the graphical view of each unit's cycle time and display its takt time utilization. A user can view the chart by time of day or view one unit at a time. 

The Time of Day chart can display the work content in relation to a takt timeline for multiple units across multiple stations for multiple takt cycles, with the units in the current takt cycle shown in red, as shown in the image at the top of this page.

The By Unit chart can display the work content in relation to a takt timeline for a single unit in all of the stations that it will pass through. 

The charts highlight the unit/station/time of day combinations for which issues could arise due to excessive work content. Users can set percentage values to be used to determine warnings (shown in yellow) and for alarms (shown in red).

For example, the users can specify that if work content between 95-105% percent of takt, a yellow warning will be displayed, and if the work content exceeds 105% of takt, a red alarm will be displayed. 

Takt Overage Alerts by Time of Day

Takt Overage Alerts by Unit

Predicting when and where additional labor is needed throughout the day is what the Advanced Sequencer does best.

Users can use the visual alerts to identify issues and, with a few clicks, re-sequence orders to avoid those issues. The spreadsheet view makes it easy to drag and drop or use a right-click selection menu to move orders up and down the list. 

Users can also use the automatic sequencing tool to view a recommended order sequence based on preferences they've predefined. A preference can be set to:

• Sequence orders to balance work content at a selected station or stations evenly throughout the day.

• Sequence orders with less work content at a selected station or stations before those with more work content.

• Sequence orders with more work content at a selected station or stations before those with less work content.

• The Daily Labor By Worker report charts the total work content at each station for a selected workday, visually displays the total time available in the workday, and calculates overall expected productivity for the unit's assembly. 

• The Daily Labor for Orders by Worker report calculates and charts the time to be spent on each order by each selected worker in a given workday.

• The Operator Labor By Day report calculates and charts the total time required for an operator to complete all units planned for his/her assigned station. This report is different from the Daily Labor By Worker graph because it reports only on a single operator and can report the work for that operator over multiple days.

• The Average Labor by Worker report charts the average labor time for each operator in the time period selected. 

• The Station Unit Details report can be generated for each operator and will list the orders the operator is scheduled to work on during a given day. The expected labor time and start time will be displayed and the operator can fill in actual production details as each order is worked on.

The Drift Analysis feature is included within the Sequence Planner module but relies heavily on data from an applied Line Balancing scenario. Blog Here.

Drift Analysis allows the engineer to evaluate the impacts of temporary over-Takt cycle time work conditions on mixed-model production assembly lines with fixed TAKT times during portions of the day.

Many mixed production assembly lines can experience significant fluctuations in station cycle time based upon the specific work content required for each configuration (a variant of model and options) of the product being produced. In order to maximize productivity, those companies often select a line rate (Takt Time) which is less than the peak cycle time of their highest work content product.

Alternatively, some companies struggle with product quality or cycle time repeatability issues which also create cycle times in stations that exceed the line Takt.  

Proplanner's powerful Drift Analysis capability allows the engineer to select a range of actual production orders which can then be evaluated in both the Drift and Gantt chart views as well as in an automatically generated data-set table that can be easily copied and pasted into Excel.

Start, End, and Break times can be specified for each day of the month and many days can be evaluated concurrently. Given the large data set sizes commonly encountered, Proplanner's user interface supports un-docking windows which can be placed in different display monitors. Users can also zoom, pan, and filter any of the display views.