The scheduler turns released work orders into a concrete timetable. It looks at the routing on each work order, the calendars on each work center, and the work centers’ available capacity — then drops every operation onto a specific time window. The result is a Gantt you can read and a per-work-center Load chart that shows how busy each resource is over time.
You’ll find the scheduler in three places:
- The Operations tab on each work order — shows the per-operation scheduled start/end and the Schedule / Clear schedule actions for that single WO.
- The Load tab on each work center — shows the day-by-day (or hour-by-hour) load picture for that WC.
- The Scheduler page under Manufacturing — the cross-WO Gantt with bulk re-scheduling.
Schedule a single work order
- Open the work order and stay on the Operations tab (it’s the default).
- Click the Schedule button in the toolbar above the operations grid.
- Pick a direction and an anchor date:
- Forward — slot every operation starting from the anchor date. The anchor is usually today or the day the components will be ready.
- Backward — work the timetable so that the last operation finishes on the anchor date. Useful when you have a promise date and want to find the latest possible release.
- Click Schedule. The grid refreshes — each operation now shows a Scheduled start and a Scheduled end.
Clicking Schedule again re-runs the scheduler. The scheduler keeps any operation that has already been started — it won’t lie about the past.
The Clear schedule button wipes every segment. Operations that have already started keep the moment they really started; everything else goes back to having no planned date.
To see the resulting timetable as a Gantt, open the Scheduler page under Manufacturing — it draws every WO segment on its work center lane.
Read the WC Load chart
The Load tab on each work center shows one bar per time bucket on a shared y-axis (labelled in hours, with dashed grid lines):
- Available capacity — the grey outer envelope, sized to “calendar open minutes × parallel capacity”.
- Committed — the blue inner bar drawn inside the envelope, sized to “sum of scheduled segments × parallelism”.
The toolbar above the chart shows the work center’s parallel capacity — how many operations can run on it at the same time. Pick Day for the 30-day overview, Hour for a 48-hour zoomed view. The info icon next to the granularity toggle opens a glossary explaining every concept on the chart.
When the inner bar turns red and exceeds the envelope, the bucket is over-committed — the scheduler had originally fit work, but a calendar exception (holiday, maintenance) added later shrank the available windows. Re-scheduling the affected WOs flushes the over-commit.
Hover any bar to see a tooltip listing every WO contributing to that bucket and how much time each one consumes.
The Scheduler dashboard
The dashboard (Manufacturing → Scheduler in the sidebar) is the cross-work-order view. Rows are work centers; rectangles are segments scheduled on them. Use the filters to narrow by date range, work center, or status.
Hover a rectangle for a tooltip with the work order number, work center, exact start/end, duration, and parallelism. Click the rectangle to open that work order’s detail page — handy when you want to drill into a specific WO without leaving the timeline.
The Re-schedule visible button runs the scheduler on exactly the work orders drawn on the timeline — whatever your filters have left in view. When the timeline is empty, it falls back to the whole organization: the status you filtered on, or every work order that is Released or In progress if you filtered on none.
The bulk dialog asks for the same direction + anchor date as the per-WO dialog. The result toast tells you how many WOs succeeded and how many failed — the dashboard refreshes automatically.
What automatic, what is manual?
| Action | When does it happen? |
|---|---|
| Scheduled start / Scheduled end written on each operation | Each schedule run — refreshed from the segments produced. |
| Segments removed when you clear the schedule | When you click Clear schedule — operations that have started are kept. |
| In-progress operations preserved across re-runs | Every re-schedule — the scheduler reads when each one really started and pins it there. |
| WO list page Scheduled columns refresh | Every schedule run — they read the per-op rollup. |
| Auto re-schedule when a calendar exception is added | No. In Beelocity 1.x the scheduler runs only when you explicitly click. We don’t auto-rebuild commitments behind your back. |
When does the scheduler refuse to run?
A few situations the scheduler will report as errors:
- Routing cycle. If two operations declare each other as predecessor, scheduling is impossible. Fix the routing first.
- No room on a work center. The scheduler gives up on a work center with no open hours in the coming year — and equally on one whose open hours are all committed already, or whose parallel capacity is smaller than the step needs. Check the work center’s calendar, its active exceptions, and how much of it is already committed on its Load tab.
- Subcontract lead time missing. A subcontract step must carry a Supplier lead time, otherwise the scheduler doesn’t know how long the supplier will hold the part.
- No operations. The work order must have its routing snapshotted before scheduling. That happens at WO release — release the WO first.
- Anchor in the past. For forward scheduling, the anchor date must be today or later.
Every error is surfaced as a toast with a sentence telling you what to do.
What the scheduler leaves to you
The scheduler is deliberately narrow: it fits steps into open hours and stops there. Four decisions stay yours.
- Which routing to use. The scheduler plans the routing the work order was released with, and never looks for another one. If a work center on that routing has no room, the whole run is refused — nothing is scheduled, and the timetable the work order already had is left exactly as it was. In a bulk run only that work order counts as a failure; the rest still get their timetable. Choosing between the main routing and an alternate is a decision you make on the work order, before you release it.
- What the supplier’s own week looks like. A subcontract step is planned as a flat run of calendar days from its Supplier lead time. The supplier’s own workload, weekends and holidays are not in the picture, and the step books no capacity on any of your work centers.
- Who does the work. The plan is built on a work center’s capacity, never on one person’s shift or leave. The shop floor keeps Assigned to you apart from the Station queue, but neither list moves anything on the timetable.
- Whether this is the best plan. The scheduler takes the earliest open window big enough that comes after whatever has to happen first. It fills gaps rather than levelling load across the shop or hunting for the plan with the least lateness. Reading the Load tab and moving work yourself is how the shop gets levelled.
See Work Orders for the Operations tab and Work Centers for the Load tab.