The new Tekla PowerFab production planning and scheduling solution makes capacity planning simpler and more flexible than before.

Work packages are the basis for the new planning solution. You can now plan work package schedules based on the estimated hours or weight to be completed by a department per week. The number of hours per department for a work package can either be input manually or calculated from production codes.

With the introduction of Department Maintenance, the Production Control menu in Maintenance has been redesigned: Station and Route Setup and Workshop Maintenance together with Department Maintenance can now be found under Fabrication Maintenance.

These three together are the core of Tekla PowerFab capacity planning.

Capacity planning has been further enhanced by introducing work areas (1) in Workshop Maintenance. Work areas are zones within a workshop, and they allow to break down your capacity planning to make it more accurate.

Department (2) and shift are also new concepts in Tekla PowerFab, grouping together similar stations within a workshop. Shifts define your capacities (4) for each department. You can define departments, shifts, and capacity based on weight or hours within one or multiple workshops and work areas.

See Manage workshops and Manage departments and shifts (Preview).

After defining departments, you can assign them to stations (3) to enhance the control of production progress.

See Manage stations.

To allocate the completed weight or hours to the correct work area and week on the schedule, you can now also select the work area that an item was completed in. See Track production by piece mark.

You can manage hours by department in the Work Package dialog. You can calculate hours by inheriting the production code hours, hours entered manually, or by weight.

See Manage production hours (Preview).

You can define the first day of the production week on the new Planning Settings tab in Maintenance > Production Control > Company Standards.

See Define planning settings (Preview) in Define company standard settings for Production Control.

When you set or modify the start date of the week, the work area schedules are adjusted accordingly.

In Company Standards, you can also define the default planning view (hours or weight) that is utilized in Department Maintenance (Preview).

For more information, see the following:

• Manage production schedules (an overview of the configuration tasks)
• Define planning settings (Preview) in Define company standard settings for Production Control
• Manage workshops
• Manage departments and shifts (Preview)
• Manage stations
• Manage production hours (Preview)

The actual planning interface, Production Planner, is in Tekla PowerFab Go.

You can launch the Production Planner from the Select Production Control Job and Work Packages dialogs by clicking the new Planner button. See Open the Production Control module and Work packages