Overview
This document provides a comprehensive overview of the key components that comprise the manufacturing workflow system. Understanding how these elements work together is essential for effective production management and scheduling.
Core System Components
Departments
Departments are logical groupings of workstations within your manufacturing organization. They serve as organizational units that help categorize and structure your workstations for better management and analysis. Currently, departments are used exclusively for reporting purposes, allowing you to group related workstations together and generate reports based on departmental organization.
Workstations
Workstations are the designated locations within your laboratory where similar work activities and production steps are performed. Each workstation represents a physical or logical area where specific types of production work occurs. Workstations have several key characteristics:
Sequence number: Determines the order in which workstations are scheduled within your production workflow
Parallel Processing: Workstations with the same sequence number will be scheduled in parallel, allowing for simultaneous processing
Next Workstations configuration: Specifies which workstations the work will proceed to after the current workstation work is completed
Work Assignment Types: Four distinct models for task distribution (Automatic, Manual Push, Manual Pull, and Custom)
Location tracking: Automatically updates case locations as work progresses through the facility
Which technicians can be assigned: Users assigned to a workstation are considered to be technicians and will be eligible to be assigned production tasks in respective workstations
Production Template Steps
Production template steps are individual manufacturing steps that you track throughout your production process. These steps represent the granular tasks required to complete manufacturing operations. Each step has important attributes:
Sequence Number: Defines the order of execution within a specific workstation
Duration and Lead Days: Time allocations for planning and scheduling
Workstation assignment: Links each step to the appropriate workstation location
Production Templates
Production templates are groups of production template steps that define the complete manufacturing workflow for specific products. These templates serve as blueprints that standardize the production process, ensuring consistency and efficiency across your manufacturing operations.
This example shows a production template for manufacturing a Zirconia Crown, displaying the sequential steps and their organization within the template structure. Each step is assigned to appropriate workstations with specific time allocations and sequence ordering.
User Capacity and Scheduling
Users (technicians) within Pilot have specific characteristics that directly impact production scheduling and capacity planning:
Work Shifts: Defined time periods when technicians are available to perform work
Capacity Multiplier: A numerical factor that determines how many steps a technician can complete within their shift period
Workstation assignments: Each technician is assigned to specific workstations where they can perform work
Pilot uses these user characteristics in combination with workstation assignment types to automatically distribute work and optimize resource utilization.
Production Schedule Generation
When a product is added to a case, Pilot performs automated production schedule generation based on the integrated components described above:
Pilot retrieves all production tasks from the products' default production templates. This determined which tasks will be added.
Same tasks across templates will be merged if a task's Merge property is on.
Tasks are grouped by workstations and sorted by the task Sequence property (from highest to lowest). This determines the order of tasks within a workstation.
Workstations are sorted by the sequence number. This determines the order of workstations.
Tasks are scheduled one by one for each workstation:
First task in the first workstation is scheduled to start at the time when a user presses the Go Live button
The next task is scheduled to start when the previous task is supposed to end (previous task's Scheduled Date and Time + previous task's Duration) plus Lead Days.
The caveat here is that if the workstation's Work Assignment Type is Automatic, rather than using this simple scheduling logic, Pilot will find the first available technician based on user shifts and capacity multiplier.
This process repeats for all tasks in a workstation
When all tasks in a workstation are scheduled, we're ready to start scheduling tasks in the next workstation(s).
If workstations have the same sequence number (parallel workstations), the starting date and time for task scheduling will be the same for all of these workstations
If the previous workstations were parallel, the starting date and time for task scheduling in this workstation will be the largest date and time of the last task in the previous workstations
This sample production schedule demonstrates how Pilot combines template steps, workstation sequencing, and technician assignments to create a comprehensive timeline for case completion. The schedule shows step names, assigned workstations, scheduled dates, and technician assignments in an organized, trackable format.