Matics Gantt is a tool for manual planning and scheduling. Manual planning is when you have the list of jobs and use the Gantt tool to assign the jobs to machines and determine the running order. Scheduling is either modifying the manual planning, or after importing the initial plan from an external ERP tool, making adjustments to the plan.

Matics Gantt provides dynamic planning and scheduling capabilities, as real-time data from the production floor ensures the Gantt chart reflects the actual production progress and changes such as delays, or an accelerated production rate will adjust the timing of currently running jobs and their following jobs in the job queue.

Jobs running on-time, jobs running late, planned and ad-hoc events/production statuses are all easily indicated in a classic Gantt chart format, and are easily managed from a single location.

Matics Gantt supports multiple-scenario planning simulations: planners can check how the work plan would be impacted if jobs are added (or removed), and use different risk models for calculating pending jobs' duration. These risk models are based on aggregated data of past production performance to provide realistic planning metrics, which are applied automatically to planned job durations. Not many solutions can harness past performance-intelligence to future planning.

Planners can transfer jobs between machines, add events and much more. When satisfied with the various planning changes, planners can release these changes to the production floor. Operators will then have these updates reflected in the machines' actionable jobs.

You can customize the planning interface to show some parts and hide others as shown here:

Customizing the Gantt chart is optional, but can facilitate planning.

The standard set for setup time is usually different from the actual setup time. This needs to be reflected in the Gantt. You have a number of ways to see these data.

In the Gantt column selector, selecting Actual setup duration will add this column to the left of the chart. And you can add the Standard setup duration column near it to compare between them easily.

Hovering over the Setup part of the job's Gantt stripe will provide the gap of how the standard setup duration compares to the actual setup duration in a tooltip:

The information presented in a tooltip needs to be configured (customized), so to get this specific setup-related hover-over information:

You can make changes to planned jobs by clicking the job's menu and using any of its options, which are described in the following sections. The available options depend on whether the job is running or not.

In the Additional settings dialog you can set or change any of the following job settings:

Use this option to suspend running jobs. Depending on the quantity produced, the job will either transition to status 11 - Suspended in which it can be reactivated, or to status 20 - Completed.

If the job hasn't started (status 3) you can cancel it, while if the job was started and then suspended (status 11) you'll use the terminate option. Terminating a job ends the job, even though the units target wasn't met.

Opens the job's page, which provides all the job's settings and actions that are available for the job. If the job is already running (active), you can suspend it from the job's page and much more.

Unassigning machines from jobs will revert the job’s status to 01 and move the job to the unassigned jobs list. Click Save changes to apply the Unassign action.

This option is available for jobs in status 02 or 03, jobs that haven't been run yet.

You cannot unassign a machine when the job is running (status 10), or when the job has been suspended (status 11).

Set dependencies between jobs running on different machines. For example that one job cannot begin until another job ends, or that other jobs cannot begin until a specific job starts. Through the dependencies dialog you can also manage the job's existing dependencies.

You can select multiple jobs (that are not necessarily consecutive) by using the Shift and CTRL keys on your keyboard. This is useful for moving multiple jobs to a different position or machine in the Jobs list and for assigning multiple jobs to the same machine from the Assign jobs table.

From Matics v3.2, unassigned jobs are supplemented with the recommendations feature. Jobs marked with the Matics recommendation icon are jobs in which there's a system recommendation based on averaging past production performance for that product.

Any machine, or the required combination of any machine + the product's specified mold, which has been used for producing the product will be presented in the recommendations table. Each recommendation will be ranked ordinally based on the calculated average performance efficiency per cycle and color coded (green shading indicating the best ranking, red shading indicating the worst ranking and all those in between without shading). The actual value for the ranking calculation is presented too in the table, so you can compare and see exactly what the difference is between each recommendation and make informed decisions.

For example, in the snapshot below the best combination of machine + mold is 0.83, but if for some reason machine L1 or mold T1 cannot be used, the next recommendations ranking 2 and 3, are 0.16 and 0.11 respectively, and since the difference between these two isn't that significant there may be factors that tilt the decision towards choosing L3 for running the job.

When rearranging the Jobs list or when assigning jobs by dragging & dropping from the Assign jobs table, the Gantt automatically enters edit mode.

In edit mode you can undo actions. Aligned with the common standard of undo actions, each click of the Undo control will undo the last action done. So if I first moved job A to the top of the Jobs list and then moved job B to be directly after it, but changed my mind and clicked Undo, job B will return to its original position in the Jobs list. Clicking Undo again will return job A to its original position.

To prevent loss of changes while working on a plan, auto refreshing of data is stopped while edit mode is active.

So even if you undid all your actions and have no changes to save, the Gantt will remain in edit mode until you click Discard and reload the Gantt with current data.

If a machine enters non-production status, the job can't run. Since it's usually unknown when the non-production status will end, the system checks the status every 5 minutes and moves the jobs five minutes forward each time for adjusting the jobs' span to the production floor reality.

The calendar event's time is added to the job's planned duration, or if the job's already running it'll add that time and extend the job's duration by the duration of the calendar event.

When setting up the system, a department's shifts can be customized to mark any time during the shift that's allocated to setup to be locked and unusable (Setup > Shifts Calendars > select the shift from the shift calendar and there either select or clear the Setup check box. If it's cleared you get the 'No setup allowed' state). For example, if a night shift doesn't have staff that do setup for the next job, when the previous job ends the next job's setup time will be marked as a 'non setup shift', and you won't be able to adjust that segment in the Gantt chart.

Setting a Fixed Start Time Target can create a time gap that will impact the job queue since all following jobs will move accordingly. The job configured with this setting can only start after the set fixed start time, and this may delay the planned start of subsequent jobs. The underlying logic is that a job queue is based on production optimization and a myriad of dependencies, so randomly starting another job if there's a time gap, won't necessarily work. Notwithstanding, it's possible to manually rearrange jobs at the machine level on the fly.

Gantt Module Save Production Plan Setting

Job Status

Job Definitions

Changing Production Status (in the context of the Operator app, but still includes useful information)

(old) Gantt Orientation