Machine Production Planner¶

The Machine Production Planner lets you plan production ahead of a shift — how much you expect to make, how long it should take, and how much downtime you're already expecting — and then compare that plan against what actually happened once the shift is over.

Setting up plans is an engineer's job.

Why plan ahead at all?¶

A plan is a forecast, not a measurement. It doesn't replace anything on the Downtime Log or Production Entry — those still record what genuinely happened, and that's still what most of OEE is built from.

What a plan does give you is something to hold the shift to: did you make as much as you expected, in the time you expected, with the downtime you expected? That's a different, equally useful question from "how effective was the equipment", which is what OEE itself answers.

Creating a plan¶

Click the + icon at the top of the page to open New Plan, and fill in:

The last two can be worked out for you — see Letting Enture work out the quantity for you below.

A plan is specific to one machine, SKU, shift row and date combination — you can't create two plans for the same things, since that would be two conflicting forecasts for the same shift row. If a shift row runs more than one product (a changeover partway through), add one plan row per product; Enture adds their planned production times together when working out that row's Planned time.

Letting Enture work out the quantity for you¶

At the top of the New Plan dialog, just below the Single Plan / CSV Upload / Auto Generate toggle, is a switch: Calculate planned qty based on cycle time.

Turn it on and Enture fills in the quantity and the production time for you, from things you've already set up:

1. It takes the length of the shift row you picked — a 06:00–14:00 row is 480 minutes.
2. It subtracts the Planned Downtime you entered, leaving the time you actually expect to be producing.
3. It divides that by the cycle time for this machine and product, taken from the matching Cycle Time Standard.

So a 480-minute shift row, 30 minutes of planned downtime and a 30-second cycle time gives 450 minutes of production and a planned quantity of 900.

The working is shown underneath the fields, so you can see exactly where the numbers came from before you save.

You can still change the numbers¶

The calculation is a starting point, not a lock. Planned Production Time and Planned Qty stay editable — type over either one and your figure is what gets saved. A cycle time standard is an average, and you may well know something about this particular shift that it doesn't: a trial run, a new operator, a batch that has to be finished by a certain hour.

An edited field is marked edited, and a Reset to calculated link appears next to the working so you can put it back. Changing the machine, SKU, shift row, date or planned downtime recalculates both fields from scratch.

The switch applies to both the single-plan form and CSV upload, and it's off by default — existing habits are unaffected until you turn it on. Auto Generate always works this way, so it has no switch of its own.

Comparing a plan against what happened¶

Click the chart icon on any plan row to open vs Actual. It shows, side by side:

• Qty variance — units actually produced against what you planned, and the difference
• Production time variance — actual running time against what you planned
• Downtime variance — downtime actually logged, split into planned and unplanned, against what you planned

This is read-only — it's a comparison, not something you edit. If the numbers are consistently off in the same direction, it usually means either the plan needs revising or something about the shift needs investigating.

Editing and deleting a plan¶

Edit lets you revise any of the planned figures — plans are forecasts, and forecasts get revised as a shift approaches. Delete removes a plan entirely; do this if a plan was set up by mistake or a shift has been cancelled.

Adding plans in bulk from a spreadsheet¶

For planning many machines, shifts or dates at once, use CSV Upload — the second option on the toggle at the top of the New Plan dialog, next to Single Plan.

1. Click the + icon at the top of the page, then switch the toggle to CSV Upload.
2. Click Download Template, at the top right of the dialog, to get a starting CSV file with the right columns.

3. Fill in one row per plan:

   Column	What goes in it
   machine_code	The machine's code (set under Machines) — not its display name
   sku	The product name
   uom	Optional. If the SKU has its own unit set up, this must match it — a mismatch is flagged as an error, since it usually means the wrong product was typed
   shift(HH:MM)	The start time of one of your organisation's OEE shift's rows, as HH:MM — see Shift Mapping. A single file can mix rows for different shift rows (e.g. some rows for "Shift A", others for "Shift B") — each row's value just has to match one of that shift's configured row start times
   date(YYYY-MM-DD)	The shift date, as YYYY-MM-DD
   production_qty	How many units you expect to produce. Optional when Calculate planned qty is on — see the note below
   planned_production_time(mins)	Expected production time, in minutes. Optional when Calculate planned qty is on — see the note below
   planned_downtime(mins)	Optional — expected downtime in minutes. Left blank, this is treated as zero

   Tip

   The (...) after a column name is just a hint about the format expected — a file with plain column names like shift or planned_downtime (no hint) uploads just as well.

   With Calculate planned qty based on cycle time switched on

   production_qty and planned_production_time become optional, and they're how you override a row:

   • Leave a cell blank and Enture calculates it for that row, from the row's shift row and the machine and product's Cycle Time Standard — exactly as described above.
   • Put a value in and that value is used as-is for that row. You can override one of the two and have the other calculated.

   The template you download leaves both columns out, since blank is the normal case — add them back yourself for the rows you want to pin. Calculated figures appear in the preview table in the accent colour, values from your file in normal text, so you can see which is which before uploading. A row that needs a calculation but has no cycle time standard is flagged as an error and left out, the same as any other bad row; a row that supplies both figures itself doesn't need a standard at all.

4. Upload the file. Enture checks every row — unknown machine codes or products, a shift time that doesn't match any row of your organisation's configured shift, a badly formatted date — and shows exactly what's wrong before anything is saved.

   A shift mismatch blocks the whole file, not just the odd row

   Because shift always has to match one of your organisation's configured OEE shift's row start times, a row matching none of them almost always means the whole file was built against the wrong shift. Rather than silently dropping those rows, Enture stops the entire upload and tells you which rows don't match, so you can check the file rather than lose data silently.

5. Once every row checks out, click Upload to create the plans. Rows are created in parallel; if a handful fail (for instance, a plan already exists for that exact machine, SKU, shift row and date), you'll get a results list showing which succeeded and which didn't, with a button to download just the failed rows so you can fix and re-upload them without redoing the whole file.

Planning a month or a week at once — Auto Generate¶

Auto Generate is the third option on the toggle at the top of the New Plan dialog. Where CSV Upload needs you to build the file, Auto Generate builds the plan itself, from the Cycle Time Standards you have already set up — and then shows you everything for review before a single plan is saved.

Use it when you plan the same machines and products month after month, or week after week, and typing or maintaining a spreadsheet of a few hundred rows is the only thing standing in the way.

Step 1 — choose what to plan¶

Then click Review. Nothing is saved at this point.

Choosing which machines and products to plan¶

Both lists start with everything selected, so if you want the whole shift planned you can leave them alone — that is what Auto Generate always did. Untick entries to plan less than that.

Both are searchable: start typing to narrow a long list, and each has Select all and Clear.

• Machines lists the machines assigned to the shift.
• Machine + SKU lists one entry per machine-and-product combination, labelled Press A – Alpha, so you can search by either. Only combinations with an active cycle time standard appear — those are the only ones Enture can work a quantity out for.

The two work together: unticking a machine removes its products from the Machine + SKU list, and ticking it again brings them back, still selected. So the usual order is to choose machines first, then narrow products if you need to.

Review stays greyed out while either list is empty — there would be nothing to plan. If the Machine + SKU list is empty even though machines are selected, none of those machines has an active cycle time standard yet: add one under Cycle Time Standards, or select different machines. Enture says so under the list rather than leaving you to guess.

Choosing the dates¶

Two ways to say how much to plan:

• One week — pick a month and a year, then pick the week. Weeks are listed by their dates (for example 05 Oct – 11 Oct) so you can see exactly what you're choosing.
• Date range — a From and a To date, for anything that doesn't line up with a week. A range covers at most 10 days at a time; use One week for longer stretches.

What gets planned, and with what figures¶

For every date, every ticked shift row and every selected machine, Enture plans one row per selected Machine + SKU combination — that is, per product that machine has an active Cycle Time Standard for and that you have left ticked. The figures come from exactly the same calculation as the switch described above — the shift row's length, divided by the cycle time — with planned downtime starting at zero, since a forecast stop is something only you know about.

Step 2 — review, adjust, then generate¶

The review step lists every row it is going to write, grouped by date, with the day of the week shown next to each date. The date heading stays visible while you scroll that date's rows. Planned Qty, UOM, Planned Production Time and Planned Downtime are all editable — change anything that isn't right.

• Remove a single row with the bin icon at the end of it. The time it was holding goes back to the other products sharing that machine's shift row — see below.
• Remove a whole date with the bin icon on that date's heading — this is the quickest way to drop Saturdays and Sundays, or a holiday. Weekend dates have their day name highlighted to make them easy to spot. (Enture has no working-day calendar of its own, so which days you don't run is your call.)
• Set one unit everywhere with the UOM box above the table and Apply to all rows. It applies to every row left in the review, not just the ones on screen; individual rows can still be changed afterwards.
• Use Previous / Next to move through the dates, and Change selection to go back to step 1.

Click Generate to write the plans. The button says how many it is about to write.

Filtering the list¶

Use the search box above the table to find plans by machine or product name.

Use the funnel icon beside the search box to show or hide the Machine, Shift, Shift Row and date filters. Leave any of the dropdowns on All to see everything. By default the date range shows the last 7 days through the next 30 — widen or narrow it as needed, or click Clear to jump back to the default and clear the other filters at the same time.