Workstations

The Production planning -> Workstations page displays a list of all the workstations and their reports.

Jump to:

1. What is a workstation group?
2. What is a workstation?
3. Workstation's properties.
4. Workstation's reports.
5. Summary reports of all workstations.
6. Schedule and report workstation maintenance.
7. Assign default departments to operations or workstations.

What is a workstation?

There are three key ideas to understanding what a workstation is:

1. A workstation is a place where individual operations are done. The workstation could be a machine, a bench, an assembly table, work area, etc. One workstation can only be part of one workstation group.
2. Your workstations define your production capacity. One operation can be done at one time in one workstation.
3. A workstation belongs to a workstation group, which groups similar production resources. When defining an operation in a product's routing a corresponding workstation group must be chosen. Only during production scheduling, a specific workstation is assigned.

In some situations, a single workstation might not correspond to a specific machine:

1. When many tools or machines are used for one operation. E.g. In a woodworks area or department there could be tens of tools, benches, tables, and machines, where one group would be used for one operation, but another group for another operation.
2. In these situations, it might not be efficient to define every single machine, because this would make the routings and reporting unnecessarily complex. Instead, it's better to find the average number of operations which can be performed concurrently in this area.
3. Most commonly, the number of operations that can run concurrently equals the average daily number of workers in the department.
4. In this case, the "area" or "department" itself is the workstation group, and the number of possible concurrent operations is the number of workstations in the group.