Gantt Chart Viewing Available in FACTIVITY

By DE Editors

FACTIVITY announced the addition of Gantt Chart viewing to its factory floor software, which enhances production planning for manufacturers as it enables views of all factory floor jobs and expands the capabilities of the Advanced Dispatch List, the company says. The Gantt Chart view is now included in FACTIVITY's Shop Floor Module.
 
"While a spreadsheet is a grid of data in columns and rows, the Gantt chart is a timeline which visually depicts work over time in graphical horizontal bars which can be dragged and dropped," said Tim MacCollum, project manager, FACTIVITY. "This picture of the shop floor enables a much wider scope of data and a more user friendly scheduling tool."
 
The Advanced Dispatch list is a spreadsheet tool that allows schedulers to interact with the workload on each machine, and provides a manual drag-and-drop functionality so jobs can easily be placed into logical sequence. Once the work is sequenced to minimize waste time, the scheduler can immediately reposition the dispatch lists for all the floor assets. This provides the floor with a refreshed list of jobs in the proper order and it can be on-demand.
 
"Being able to interact with and move jobs on the Gantt Chart allows the user to visually see the impact not only on the operations scheduled for this job, but can also highlight the cascading impact on jobs scheduled in other work centers," MacCollum said.
 
To enhance the Advanced Dispatch list and enable employees to see all the operations of a single job and not just the machine components, FACTIVITY has developed an add-on functionality to view the entire routing chain for all released jobs. It includes a movable time horizon on the top of the screen and work centers listed down the side in groups defined by reporting stations within the FACTIVITY MES system. 
 
"This Gantt is a simpler tool that provides good visibility combined with finite scheduling (level loading) to make this feature a great addition to the paperless dispatching functions in the Shop Floor Workbench," said John Leibert, president, FACTIVITY. 

For more information, visit FACTIVITY.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.