Tim to read: 9 min
Create a Shift Plan for Assembly
As an assembly shift planner, you can manage shift schedules, vacation times or downtimes in a snap with ipolog
Excel sheets, planning walls or PowerPoints quickly reach their limits. The situation becomes even more difficult for the shift planner when employees are absent with short notice due to illness or many are on vacation at the same time. This means that production, assembly or logistics in your company will not run smoothly. Is this situation familiar? Then find out how you can solve these problems.
For the shift plan or duty roster to work best it is important to know a few things about the production staff and their tasks. The following information is essential:
Which employee has which qualifications:
Which tasks are actually performed:
How long employees need for which task:
Are workstations already optimally configured:
As a planner you also need some basic information to be able to create a good shift plan:
- The hours worked per day or the number of hours per week
- Rest periods and breaks
- Number of shifts – (including night shifts)
- Knowledge of public holidays at the respective workplaces
As a shift planner, personnel planner or duty scheduler, you know about your employees’ qualifications, tasks and any problems they may have in performing their duties. But – as you know – that is only half the story. Time and again, employees are absent with short notice due to illness. Furthermore, your employees regularly go on well-deserved holidays. Due to private appointments, shifts are exchanged again and again or individual hours are taken off. These arrangements are often only made verbally and not everyone receives this important information. Excel cannot help here and creates a headache for shift planners or duty schedulers trying to keep everything straight. But not for long! Our ipolog software allows you to feel confident about these situations in the future. From now on you can set the pace yourself.
In our ipolog software you can simulate work processes and better plan the scheduling of your employees. The software shows you in real time every step your workers take in 3D and in the real production environment. You can see walking paths as well as the movement of the belt and the respective process steps (assembly work, retrieving material, etc.).
This allows you to very quickly see whether schedules are useful or in need of improvement. Do changes to the material supply result in an improvement in efficiency or is moving a complete workstation the better alternative? You can quickly test this scenario with a few mouse clicks using drag & drop. Every change is instantly visible and the changed material conditions and routes are considered and displayed.
You can make every single planning change directly in ipolog and see instantly in 3D what the consequences are. This makes the planning of each shift fast and efficient. You can play through alternatives and coordinate your results with other shift planners.
Thanks to the clearly arranged 3D simulation you know:
- How many employees you need
- How many employees you need per shift (for example, fewer workers on the night shift)
- What the employees are to be used for
- Which qualification an employee needs for which tasks
- In which weeks there are staff shortages and how you can solve them
- At which points your employees are not yet optimally utilized
With the knowledge stored in ipolog about the tasks, the skills of your employees and the time required for the work steps, you can efficiently reschedule your staff with just a few clicks, even in case of illness, change of shifts, other absences or holidays. ipolog supports you and highlights bottlenecks and unlocked potential.
With these steps a simpler and more efficient creation of rosters and shift plans is achieved:
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4
- Increase in productively used time in assembly by at least 10%.
- Clear representation in one software tears down communication barriers
- Reduction of the planning effort for work preparation by up to 50%
- Planners gain time for the optimization of work processes, which, according to experience, can increase rationalization potential by up to 20%
- Optimal deployment of assembly staff for the respective production program
- Higher delivery reliability for satisfied customers and successful production managers
What our customers say
Digitalization, visualization, and the ability to analyze data were the most important decision criteria in our software selection. In the provisioning planning, we have been able to achieve significant improvements with the ipolog software so far.