This is intended to help users understand workshop loading and capacity in Autoline.
On a basic level the workshop capacity is the number of productive hours available in the techs shift, times the number of productive technicians in the workshop. EG 10 techs available for 8 hours, will give 80 hours available for the day. Based on a 5 day week, then you will have 400 productive hours available for the week.
There are also other factors in Autoline that can either increase or decrease the hours available.
When setting up a technician, the availability on the resource record is generally set to 100%. By increase or decreasing this figure, this will affect the available hours that Autoline ‘sees’ that the technician has available to sell and adjusts the overall capacity hours accordingly.
Some resources like the workshop foreman may only be required to be 50% productive. Apprentices could be 25% in the first year, 50% in the second year and 75% in the third year. The hours available in the capacity will be the shift hours times the availability percentage on the technician/resource record.
This also applies the service advisors if they are setup for the customer meet and greet lines that are loaded to them. Their availability is factored into the total capacity hours by default. There is a parameter that can be set to exclude their hours from the capacity calculation.
There is a workshop loading parameter that will allow you to view the capacity hours from the first loading screen in point of sale. For this to show, the workshop loading parameter must be ticked and the operators view must be set to Actual load (hours) on the POS operator record. This is setup per user.
Capacity this is the total calculated hours that are available for all techs for the day (Shift hours times availability)
Assigned the work that is assigned to technicians in the loading grid
Unassigned the work that is not assigned to technicians
Remaining the difference between all assigned, unassigned and the capacity hours. This also takes in to account the current time when calculating the remaining hours. As above in the screen shot above, no work is loaded, but at the time of the screen shot, a total of 1.5 hours had passed since the start of the shift. This reduces the available hours by 15 (10 techs times 1.5 hours) that is left in the day to sell. With carry over jobs, this will reduce the remaining time by the difference between the clocked time and the time allowed.
If you are loading labour to the technicians, then the resource availability and skill percentage will be used in the grid. If you do not load to technicians, then the availability and skill will not be used when reducing the overall capacity and only the hours on the labour line will be used.
Reducing a technician’s availability
When adjusting the technician’s availability on the resource record, this affects the capacity hours. If a technician is set to 50%, then based on the 8 hours shift, this will only make 4 hours available for the day for that technician.
Reducing the days capacity by 4 hours to a total of 76 hours.
The shift/grid in the technician loading grid will not change when doing this. This will still display the fill shift the technician is setup for.
If you were to load a labour line for one hour to a technician that is 50% available, then the time will load as 2 hours on the loading grid, but the remaining time will only be reduced by one hour.
The loading grid still shows the whole shift pattern, but adjusts/loads to the grid based on the availability.
Technician ability/skill percentage
When setting/changing the technicians by the skill, the technician’s total hours available for the day will not change. If the technician shift is 8 hours and their skills are set to 50%, then the total hours of 8 hours for the shift will display in the overall capacity.
When the skill ability is set, this will only factor into the total capacity if you are loading labour lines to technicians. If you have a one hour job and you load it to a technician that has 50% for that skill, then when loading the line, it will block out 2 hours in the loading grid, and also reduce the overall capacity by 2 hours.
If the labour line is not loaded to a technician, the capacity will only be reduced by the hours on the labour line and the skill percentage will not factor in reducing the capacity hours.
If you have both the availability on the resource record and the ability on the skill set, this will have a cumulative effect on the loading hours. If both the availability is set to 50% and the skill for the labour line is set to 50%, then when loading a 1 hour labour line in the grid, this will block out 4 hours for the job.
For the information in Autoline to be as accurate as possible, then data and setup needs to also be accurate. This includes the allowed time on RTS codes needs to be relevant to the job.
Often with carry over jobs there can be discrepancies with the time clocked vs the time allowed on the job. If a job turns into a large job and the labour line only has a low allowed time, then the system will not know how much longer it will take to complete the job unless the labour line is updated. The system can only calculate the difference between what is clocked and what is allowed on the labour line. This is a common issue and will mainly affect the current days loading with the carry over work.