Line Activities / Schedule

Logix Activities module manages information about schedule of all manufacturing operations relevant from Logix perspective.

Functional summary

Provides Registry of all activities containing information about
- planned, scheduled and actual execution dates
- name, type, subtype, description of an activity
- specific information for given activity type (i.e. SKU id for production order activity)
- optional expected labor utilization
- correlation between activities (i.e. Changeover and Production Order)
- Realtime performance of activity execution, as tracked by PackOS (i.e. current yield, current ETA)
- Registered actual labor utilization as described in 2.7 Labour productivity
Carries out data validation, including complex cross-checks (i.e. can given SKU be manufactured on given line and is data about line configuration for given SKU available in PackOS).
Orchestrates activity schedule with equipment states in PackOS (i.e.. Raising events about exceeding expected activity times and enabling PackOS to trace unplanned downtimes)
Combines into one schedule information coming from various sources. Information about activities can be created and maintained by various parties: external systems (ERP/APS), PackOS User Interfaces, Other Logix Applications (i.e. KeepUp for equipment service activities).
Exposes Logix schedule through public REST API both for creating and querying activities (see 2.8 LogiX Public API ✔️ )

Recognized activities

Production Order - for tracing production of given SKU.

Changeover - setup between Production Orders, always corelated with and following production order.

Cleaning - activity for tracing manual and automatic line cleaning.

Currently starting / stopping cleaning activity is only available from the API

Maintenance - service activity, optionally can be linked with KeepUp service orders (expected in future release).

Generic ‘Other’ activity - (expected in future release).

Common activity attributes

ID - external identifier of activity, unique within given plant. Identifier must begin and terminate with a digit or letter and can contain ‘_' and '-’ letters inside. Identifier has to be unique within whole site.

LineCode - line to which given activity is assigned.

Execution dates - Logix traces three sets of start/end dates:

planned dates - for activities managed by external planning system - these are dates originating from this systems (i.e. as imported through API or file import) and are readonly.

scheduled dates - dates when given activity should be executed, managed by PackOS application, available to modify by authorized user in PackOS Applications.

actual dates - dates showing actual time when Logix registered execution of given activity.

ETA - Realtime estimation when given activity will be completed as predicted by LogiX (taking into account actual performance)

Expected Effort / Actual Effort -planned/actual labor utilization (summarized manhours amount)

Expected changeover effort - planned labor utilization for a changeover

Status - current activity status:

Draft - activity not yet validated
Scheduled - activity ready to be started
Started - activity in progress
Suspended - activity on hold, can be started or completed
Completed - activity finished

Kind - additional activity classification within given type (eq. kind of changeover: Labeling vs Product change)

Description - additional free text to describe activity

Additional Fields - optional collection of arbitrary name/value pairs to enrich/classify/describe given activity (expected in incoming release)

Activities Autostart

If you set line property ActivitiesAutostart to true, PackOS will automatically use the plan of activities as a queue. After the previous activity is completed, the first released, not-completed activity which planned start date has already passed will be automatically started

Activity states and activity validation

Whenever new activity is created or any key attribute is changed - Logix triggers activity validation.

Since this validation sometimes reaches to other Logix Service and to keep system responsive validation is performed asynchronously - it means that new or changed activity is always saved in ‘Draft’ state and then, when validated positively, it automatically goes to ‘Released’ state.

Unvalidated activities (i.e. lacking key attributes like SKU id for production Order) stays in ‘Draft’ and information about all validation errors are provided.

Production Order activity (with optional related changeover)

Valid production order activity must contain particular data:

SKU Id - Item identifier which must be configured for given line (filled 'Line configuration tab' in Items repository).
Flow Id - important when more then one line setup (flow) is configured for given line (if only one is available it is selected by default)
Planned quantity and Quantity unit.

This unit must be included in conversion definitions for given product and line (packaging definition for given SKU) - otherwise PackOS will fail to count produced Items.

Scheduled dates for execution
Optional Changeover Duration (minutes). When entered it will add, along with production order -correlated, preceding Changover Activity with Scheduled Start Date earlier that the order by a given time.

Working with Activities in PackOS:

All scheduled, completed and draft activities are available through Activities view, available in two modes:

table view- with activities grouped in by state:

Timeline view- where activities are visualized according to their duration and arrangement on timeline

From version 3.8 you can enter the edit mode of the Activities on the Timeline. In 3.8 release, you can edit only Activities in the future which are in Draft status. In the future release, you will be able to edit all activities in draft and released status.

Using this view new activities can be added manually or imported from files - described in Importing