Direct Planning Project features a management of time impositions on jobs: earliest start date, latest end date, imposed (locked) job position and manual or automatic alerts to assist the planner.
Direct Planning Project – Job with an earliest start date and a manual alert
Direct Planning Project – Time constraints in job details
Earliest start date
On every job of the project, you can enter an earliest start date. For Direct Planning, this is strict constraint; which means that, when the “planning assistance” enabled, you are assured that the project order will always be scheduled after that date.
It should be noted that flags “awaiting item receipt” are able to automatically generate a constraint of earliest start date, when you are waiting for an item at a given date.
Latest end date
On every job of the project, you can enter a latest end date. For Direct Planning, this is a “target” constraint; which means that the planning assistance will help you avoid delays.
For this, the schedule generates visual alerts on jobs, when:
- Job is likely to be late: which means that it ends less than X hours before its latest end date.
- Job is late: which means that it ends more than Y hours after its latest end date (tolerance on delay).
Lock the position of a job
Direct Planning Project also gives the opportunity to lock the position of a job. The planning assistance and its left-adjusting (as soon as possible) or right-adjusting (as late as possible) modes give you the opportunity to automatically place jobs, taking time and job precedence constraints into account.
Locking a jobs assures you that this job will never be moved, nor automatically by the planning assistance, nor manually upon a drag and drop performed by the planner.
Manual alerts
Further to the automatic alerts mentioned above, you can enter a manual alert on each job. A memo area lets you tell more about this alert.