Added the ability to create placement schedules by utilizing a cycle week configuration that will look at current flock placements and schedule out new placements by the cycle week configuration.  Users are then able to view these future placements in a view and be able to modify schedules to recalculate as well as be able to split placements out.

Configurations

If the Placement Scheduler is not showing up in the System Types contact support.  They will run the spSyncBusinessType in the database.

Link Scheduler to create Estimates in system for flocks

System → Settings – Feed Mill / Scheduling Tab

Enable if you would like to establish the link from scheduler forecast to create flock estimates.

Open

Schedule Start Date on Farm Form

You may only want to schedule placements for certain farms or bird types so we added a configuration to the farm form.  Set the date the scheduler should start picking up this flock with forecasting placements.  If there is no date, the system will not schedule placements for this farm.  The schedule will pick it up as long as the date is prior to the calculate until date on the forecast form.

You will want to set this date on Pullet Farms, Brood Farms and Broiler Farms

Open

Manage Individual Placements

To add or manage individual placements in the system, you can go to Manage Schedules → View the calendar for the division and/or farm that you would like to see and select Scheduled Placements.

This will bring up the calendar view that will have all the placements for the filtered view.

Select New to schedule a new placement.

This screen will come up and you can add a placement at the farm level or at the house level.

On Add, the following form will come up.  Here you can enter the information necessary for placement.

Subject: This field will automatically populate on Save to the Schedule Type that you selected to create.

Location: You can add a location.  (Optional)

Start Time: Record Start Date and Time.

End Time: Record End Date and Time.

Flock Code: If you have a flock code for the placement, you can enter that here. (Optional)

Contract: You can apply a contract to the placement. (Optional)

Sex: You must apply a sex to the placement. (required)

Quantity: Add the quantity of birds to be placed.

Capacity: Here you can add the farm/house capacity.  Manually entered at this time.

Hatch Date: Enter the flocks hatch date. (Required)

Hatchery: Select the hatchery the placement is coming from.

Cycle Days: Enter the cycle days, this will calculate the cycle Weeks and Sell date. Enter one or the other.

Cycle Weeks: Enter the cycle weeks, this will calculate the cycle days and sell date. Enter one or the other.

Sell Date: Sell date will be calculated by the hatch date and the cycle days.

Custom Fields Tab.  The custom fields tab, will show any custom fields you have set up for scheduled placements.  See Custom Attributes Tab for more information.

If required information is missing, validation will occur on save and you will not be able to continue.

On Save, the following form will appear if there are conflicts with existing placements.  Here you can modify the New Start dates, cycle numbers, and New Sell Dates so placements fall in line.  You can un-check the check-boxes to make no changes to the placement.  If you select Accept, the records that have the Save Changes checkbox will now utilize the new Recommended Dates that were generated or modified.  If you select Cancel, it will continue to save the placement you created and make no further changes to existing placements.

Split Placement

When you have a scheduled placement for a day but need to split it out to multiple days or from multiple hatcheries, you can then right-click the placement record from the calendar view and select split placement from the context menu. 

This will bring up the following form, where you can change the record dates, the hatchery the placement will come from, and enter in a new quantity or percent of quantity.  Entering a quantity will change the quantity from the original scheduled placement.  Select Split to then create a new placement record on the calendar. You can access the Forecast and click on “Load” to see the newly added record with a Record Type of ‘Split’.

Calculate and Schedule/Manage Projected Placements

For broiler chickens and turkeys, birds are placed at a fast pace. These placements need to be managed at a high level over a period of up to a year. Layers may manage placements for up to five. This placement scheduling feature will allow users to update dates for existing placements, view them all in one grid, and calculate new ones for future dates.    

Configuring Schedule Placements 

We will not be able to schedule for facilities that do not have cycle days configured. Cycle days can be configured at the Division, Farm, or House level. When scheduling, LIVE will look for the value at the level we are scheduling for (house or farm) and use that value, If no value can be found the facility cannot be scheduled. 

Permissions, security, and affiliations for this feature are all derived from the settings we have for the scheduling window.

Loading Existing Placements

Scheduling → Scheduling → Manage Schedules

Choose at least a division and the scheduled placement type.

If we would only like to calculate placements for a specific farm or house, then also make those selections.

Forecasting Placements

While scheduling placements is selected as a visible type, we will see a new button at the bottom of the screen to "Forecast".

Clicking this button opens a new form designed for viewing scheduled placements in list view. We can recalculate and edit them all from here.

The calculation form opens, always filtered by the selections we made on the scheduling screen. If we would like to schedule records for a different facility we will need to first close this screen and update our scheduling filter criteria.

At the top of the screen is an "As-Of" date field. When this is selected and we click "Load" this will get all placement records for our filter facilities that are scheduled after and including this date. Because any change we make to past records may cascade to future ones for the same facility, all future records are loaded into the view.

When we click load, the grid's header is updated with the as-of date we chose.

In our placement view, we can see all schedule records that would appear in the calendar, only listed in the grid. This allows us to see all schedule records lined up without empty calendar dates between them. We can group and sort these records and get a view of how they all relate.

The buttons on this form are as follows:

• Save: Saves any changes we make to the grid. Recalculated results and newly generated placements are not committed until we click this! After you click “Save”, a record will be generated in the calendar, and a corresponding record for the flock will also be created in Estimated Placements.

• Recalculate: Clicking this will update all placement dates and cycle days and generate new placements between the after and until dates.

• Delete: Delete the selected placement. If a record is deleted in this section, it will also be removed from both the calendar and “Estimated Placements”.

• Close: Closes the form.   

Some key columns on the grid are:

• Do Not Recalculate: When this is set the scheduled record will not be recalculated, and it's cycle days will not update. if we want to skip a span of time to schedule between two dates locking the placements before and after that span of time will guarantee the system never tries to fill that time in.

• Flock Code: This is an editable user-defined flock code.

• Placement Date and Time: These are editable fields.

• Quantity: The number of head to place. This is defaulted to the house capacity but can be edited.

• House Capacity: This is the capacity configured on the house. If we are calculating placements at the farm level, this will aggregate all values for houses on the farm.

• Hatch Date: The hatch date of the placed birds.

• Hatchery: An editable field that will assign the hatchery for which the placement is stocked. When viewing the over / short screen, these assignments will help show us if we will be able to meet our placements for the day.

• Cycle Days / Weeks: Defaulted from the facilities, this is the number of days that the house will be occupied for this flock. This time should factor in any downtime between flocks. 

• Record Type: "Calculated" records are those that were generated by this process and never updated. If a user creates a record either from this screen or the "Manual" if it was manually created or edited after it was calculated.

• Next Placement Date: This is the placement date + cycle days. If there are no gaps in our schedule, this date should align with the next placement record in the list.

Calculating / Recalculating Placement Records

Once we have loaded the screen to view existing schedule records, we can calculate new ones. We do that by clicking the "Recalculate" button.

There are a few settings we can set before recalculating:

• Calculate After: Any schedule records with placement dates will not be recalculated. This is a helpful setting as the date of actual placement approaches. We will not need to lock down all records with the "Do Not Recalculate" setting, we just set the date that we know we do not want to recalculate before and they will remain unchanged.   

• Calculate Until: Any and all existing records will be recalculated unless they are marked not to in, “Do Not Recalculate”. When those have all been updated, we will generate new ones until this date.

• Schedule At This Level: Specifies whether we will create placements for farms or houses.   Layers typically schedule at the House level, as there is usually one flock assigned to each house. In contrast, Broiler and Brood farms generally schedule at the Farm level since they typically have one flock per farm that is distributed across multiple houses.
  
  

Remember to save any manual changes before recalculating!

Note: It is not necessary to load the screen first. Clicking recalculate will load all existing schedule records since the last save and calculate new ones after. 

When calculating placements, these are the steps the software takes:

For each facility (farm or house):

• We validate the cycle days, if there are any missing we post a message to the "Messages" tab and skip this farm or house.

• If the facility is missing a default contract, some fields can not default on the placement. We will not skip this facility, but we will post a warning message on the messages tab.

• Existing placements are sorted by their start date, and for each one:

  • Is it marked as "Do Not Recalculate"? skip it- move on to the next one.

  • Is it's start date before the "Calculate After" date? skip it- move on to the next one.

  • If we have made it to this point, this record needs recalculating:

    • Update the placement date to match the prior record's next placement date.

    • Update the cycle days to match the facility configuration.

    • Calculate the next placement date.

    • We do not recalculate the quantities.

• Once we are done updating existing records, we will create new ones as long as we are behind the "Calculate Until" date. For each "Next Placement Date" behind the calculate until date:

  • Create a new placement.

  • Set its placement date to match the prior record's next placement date.

  • Set the cycle days to match the facility configuration.

  • Calculate the quantities and house capacity. If we are calculating at the farm level, the house capacity is the sum total of all houses on the farm.

  • Set the hatchery from the farm default.

  • Default values from the contract.

Note that when we recalculate, we can see here that the placement dates line up with the last record's next placement date. This is what we want in the schedule.

If we want to schedule downtime between placements, we calculate them manually set dates for the placement before and after the time, and set them as "Do not recalculate". The system will not try to fill that time.

Users can right-click a record and recalculate from that point forward. All records for that farm/ house with a higher sort number are recalculated using the above logic.

Messages

When calculating is finished display messages on a second tab from the grid. Focus on that tab if there are any errors or warnings.

Over and Short Values

System → Scheduling → Hatchery Schedule

This screen can be found in the existing scheduling menus. Users will enter projected hatched birds available to them for various plants. Oftentimes, we will provide a sql job that will add standing orders for this database, defaulting the values for them. 

On the new scheduling grid, we have provided a view of these scheduled values. This grid loads with every hatchery schedule for every plant after the form's as-of date.

Regardless of how we have filtered the view, we can see the total amount scheduled to be placed for all facilities across all divisions.

It is not required to assign a hatchery to a placement record. These scheduled placements will not be factored into this screen.

Clicking away and back to the tab will refresh the view.

Report View

Utilize the "Scheduler Item Transaction" data set to create reports to view scheduled information.  There are calculations in the data set that are specific to the placement scheduler type.