N
Nicholas
Jon,
Yes, with plenty of time, you can do all the things you
mention, including automatic updates when the clients
data changes. MS Project can support resource levelling
for Machine & Labour resources and supports multiple
critical paths which you will need to switch on.
Transferring the raw orders data into MS Project will
take quite a bit of coding but is fairly routine COM
stuff. Depending on whether the client manufactures
products for stock or is in a make to order environment
(or bit of both) you may want to alter the structure of
the data Eg Work Orders for make to Order, product bill
of materials/ops structure for product orders).
I've done this during the past 2-3 years from a VFP
database. I'd be writing for hours to try and cover all
the issues that arose for us, but some of the more
obvious ones were, Project expects a fixed project start
date whereas production schedules are rolling schedules
of more & more work orders, so you'll need to provide for
altering the Project start date and clearing out the
completed stuff at intervals.
Once you get that far you may find the schedule goes out
of date very quickly due to over-runs and changing
priorities, etc, and you will probably want updates from
the clients shop floor data collection system if that is
accessible, and may find that system wasn't written with
updating MS Project in mind (ie Plenty of room for
difficulties there)
You can email me at the address below if you want further
info/help. If you want to send me a small sample of
their SQL data records I'll see how compatible it is with
our existing code
Nick
Yes, with plenty of time, you can do all the things you
mention, including automatic updates when the clients
data changes. MS Project can support resource levelling
for Machine & Labour resources and supports multiple
critical paths which you will need to switch on.
Transferring the raw orders data into MS Project will
take quite a bit of coding but is fairly routine COM
stuff. Depending on whether the client manufactures
products for stock or is in a make to order environment
(or bit of both) you may want to alter the structure of
the data Eg Work Orders for make to Order, product bill
of materials/ops structure for product orders).
I've done this during the past 2-3 years from a VFP
database. I'd be writing for hours to try and cover all
the issues that arose for us, but some of the more
obvious ones were, Project expects a fixed project start
date whereas production schedules are rolling schedules
of more & more work orders, so you'll need to provide for
altering the Project start date and clearing out the
completed stuff at intervals.
Once you get that far you may find the schedule goes out
of date very quickly due to over-runs and changing
priorities, etc, and you will probably want updates from
the clients shop floor data collection system if that is
accessible, and may find that system wasn't written with
updating MS Project in mind (ie Plenty of room for
difficulties there)
You can email me at the address below if you want further
info/help. If you want to send me a small sample of
their SQL data records I'll see how compatible it is with
our existing code
Nick