The Planning Mode shows what plates are scheduled to be cut on the machines. With TouchCut Integration, the machines can also dynamically update this page with which plate they are working on, how far through they are, who the operator is, providing real-time feedback of cutting progress to a workshop supervisor, and to sales people who may be asked that status of their job by customers.
Reports are available here to summarize machine performance, plates scheduled, plates cut between dates etc.
See Also:
Creating and Editing Machine Schedules
The machine view displays the scheduled plates to be cut in chronological order, and allowing planning of the when jobs are to be completed. The machine views allow the order to be changed by dragging a plate forward or backward in the sequence. Plates can also be dragged between machines allowing a plate to be moved into another machines sequence. In the Schedule based views, working and non-working times are applied to give a clearer estimate of when a plate will be expected to be cut.
Views
The selected view can be changed in the View Style selection box near the top left of the window as shown below. There are three views to choose from Machine Hours, Schedule Expanded and Schedule Collapsed.
Machine Hours is a little more compact vertically if you have a lot of machines, and does not require a Machine Availability Schedule to be set up.
The machines will be grouped by Site if they are associated with different Sites, and the sites can be expanded and collapsed by clicking on the Site headers.
Machine hours simply shows the plate sequence for all sites and machines against working hours in blue. With this we can estimate in how many working hours the plate is expected to start/finish cutting.
We can also visualize the non-scheduled items via checking 'Not Scheduled' in the legend.
This will show the plate sequence against days of the week. Note that non-working times are not shown (e.g. Saturday and Sunday in the below image). Initially this view will show the default scheduling (9-5 Mon-Fri) with no breaks. You can add your working schedule, breaks, holidays and maintenance times to improve the accuracy for the expected plate finish times.
This view shows all the time without collapsing non-working times. In this view it is possible to drag break times as well as override the start/finish time of a break (If Enable Break Editing is checked).
Note that as the items decrease to a certain width, they will pop-out a small non-selectable region below their standard area, and become slightly darker in color. This helps you visualize tiny items with limited screen real-estate.
As progress of items approaches 100%, skinny items will begin stacking on top of other items - although you can always select skinny items above their larger counterparts, navigate to, and search for them.
Navigation
Sites
Sites can be expanded or collapsed by left-clicking on the site capsule. The triangle indicates whether the site is expanded or collapsed.
Scrolling
Vertical scrolling of the sites and machines can be done using the Mousewheel.
The timescale can be zoomed in and out by holding down the Ctrl key while using the mousewheel : Ctrl+Mousewheel
Horizontal zoom in/out can be done with the mousewheel over the schedule to be able to see the full schedule, or see details of a plate that is too small to read at the current zoom level. Horizontal scrolling is done with the scrollbar at the bottom of the view
Navigation buttons, shown below are left to right 1. Auto-zoom: to show the full schedule 2 and 3 Zoom in and zoom out
Search
To make finding particular plates easier there is search functionality to allow finding plates with the following options
•Plate ID
•Customer
•Job Number
•Purchase order
•Due Before
•Material
•Program name
•Scheduled by
•With Extra Processing
•Having a tool of type (Beveling/Cutting/Drilling/Marking/Milling/Pause)
•with Tool Name or Process Name like
For text matches, wildcards are supported and searches are case-insensitive, so for example, when searching by Tool or Process Name:
•tap* will find all plates with tapping process names like TAP M10, TAP M12, Tap 1/2"-8 UNC etc,
•KSEM* will find all KSEM drills,
•*plasma* will find all plasma tools, depending on how you have named your tools of course.
Note that certain Kinetic plugins may add additional filters to this list.
Once the option is selected and a value is applied, a purple box will be shown to the right, showing the search is active. Plates that match the search criteria will be highlighted as seen below. To see the original plate color press the clear button to clear the search.
