MRS (Multi Resource Scheduling) - Show operation status in Planning Board

Because the current MRS thread is some long and complicated I chose to move this question into a seperate thread:

Initial question:

Like many companies, it is not unusual at my customer for their Planners to create orders with multiple operations, particularly since many orders require different crafts to perform the work. When the Planning Board is launched and Planners lok at work scheduled for the past week they want to be able to see at a glance which operations have been completed and which operations, perhaps from the same order, have not and may need to be rescheduled. Their preference is to select "final confirmation" when using transaction IW41 and thereby set the operation system status to CNF when the work on an operation has been completed. They then want to somehow use this CNF operation status to drive something visual in the graphical Demand layout display and Resource layout display to enable the Planner to see at a glance that the operation has been completed. I've tried several approaches with configuration of abstract statuses and the user interface profile without success. My customer's interest in being able to see the completion status of an operation in the MRS Planning Board makes a lot of sense to me. I'm hoping someone can help me with a technique for modifying the Planning Board so that it displays the completion status of an operation in a visual way.

Response from Varun Verma:

Hi Mark,

The problem at your customers end is nothing new.

What you can do ( many other customers have done it in similar way ) is:

1) you integrate the status CNF into MRS.

Check the customizing: Basic Settings -> Assign ERP Objects -> Status

2) configure in MRS that for status CNF, the assignments and demands (only in item work list or Hotlist) is colored to GREEN (or any other color)

Check customizing: Set Up Scheduler Workplace -> Workplace Profiles -> Define User Interface Profiles

Thus the users will know visually, that the green colored assignments are already completed.

By the way, in your work list you can also filter the demands based on their status 😉

Regards

Varun.

Followup question:

Varun,

Thanks for the response. I thought I had tried this but perhaps it's because in the UI profile I had not entered something in both the status groups for assignments and the status groups for demands. I have a bit more testing to do but it appears that the demand status now gets updated from the operation status of PCNF (linked to abstract status WORK_START) and CNF (linked to abstract status WORK_STOP). I also get a red bar (C4) for PCNF and a green bar (C1) for CNF. Do you have a better status group I should be using in place of C1 and C4? Status groups C1 and C4 give me a bar but it doesn't look like the demand bar with a outline and alphanumeric description of the demand, it's just a colored bar.

I know the work list can be filtered based on their MRS "planning" status, however, it doesn't appear to permit filtering by the status of the operation unless I add the operation status as an additional field in the worklist. Is there something I'm missing here? And even if it did, my customer wants to be able to see the CNF status indication in the Demand layout and schedule using the work centers so the worklist is not being shown like it is in the Resource layout.

Mark

Edited by: Mark Scott on Aug 10, 2009 3:35 PM