Help with Scheduling

**charliefunkuk** · 11-08-2010, 03:48 PM

Hi Everyone,

I run a small workshop and want to start scheduling my jobs so that I can give more accurate delivery dates. I dont know how to do what is in my head. Basically I will create a sheet that will define the hours a particular machine is available, for example 8:00am to 5:30pm Monday to Saturday. What I want to be able to do it create a new sheet for each machine and as I enter jobs into a list one after another (in the order they are made) I also define the hours to complete that job. Id like the start and end time of the jobs to be calculated based on the hours available as above. This way I can print schedules for each machine showing order of jobs, and this will also enable me to quote accurate delivery dates for new work.

I have no clue really where to start and a relative newbie, but have created a simple quote system in Excel before.

If anyone knows of templates that do the job then even better.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

Neil

**squiggler47** · 11-08-2010, 04:25 PM

I used to manage 4 injection moulding machines which where temperamental, but I tracked jobs in a simple table for each machine with a calculated runtime, and a %done calculated by knowing how many parts I had completed, I then just summarised with a pivot table.

Using the sort feature (assuming excel 2003,2007,2010) of the table allowed me to change the run order and/or insert new jobs pushing completion times out, and the totals at the bottom gave the run time, based on 24 or 8 hour run-times for each machine.

By graphing the tables it also gave an indication of machine capacity!

**squiggler47** · 11-08-2010, 04:27 PM

What version of Excel are you using, you should set it in your profile, to get a better answer!

**squiggler47** · 11-08-2010, 04:55 PM

Here is a sample, written for Excel 2010 note the workdays are set for Sunday only off in the formula, but that can be changed if this suits your needs. It should work in 2007 although I havent tested it!