How to deal with operators who can only work on specific machines

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Posted on by phyberoptx

Hi all, I’m hoping you can help me.

We run a sewing floor for medical products. We have various types of sewing machines and cutting machines. A routing might include several types of machines.

But the limiting factor for us is not the machine capacity but the labor. A sewing machine needs a person to operate it - one person can’t work two machines at the same time. And which people are skilled to operate which machines varies. Tom might be skilled in a ZigZag and Bartac, and Harry might be skilled in Bartac and Mauser stitch.

How do we setup Manufacturing such that Tom can be used as a resource for the steps he is capable of running, but not the steps he isn’t capable of running?

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Dynamics 365 Business Central

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Ben Baxter 5,810 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at

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How to deal with operators who can only work on specific machines

This is actually a lot more complicated than it seems, as it requires a sophisticated Scheduling tool. Unless your operators are trained on the exact same machines, you generally can't group them under a Work Center. This means the system doesn't know what other resources are capable of running specific machines.

I would encourage you to look into MxAPS from Insight Works. It allows you to setup your Routes to list the Operator, and other Operators capable of running that operation (due to the Machine required), without requiring the Operators to be grouped in any way. This is done via their Alternate Groups, where you would define the operators capable of running a type of Machine.

Now that you have a way of identifying the Operators capable of running the Operation (machine), you need to establish a Start-Start relationship with the Operator and the Machine (via parallel routing operations). This way the machine can't run without an operator also being scheduled at the same time.

I would definitely reach out to Insight Works (and your partner) to see if it might be a good fit for your needs.

Best Regards,

Ben Baxter

Accent Software Inc