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I have been building a employee scheduling system in a factory environment. New employees need to be trained on machines, for a certain number of shifts, with a

I have been building a employee scheduling system in a factory environment. New employees need to be trained on machines, for a certain number of shifts, with a limit of how many employees can train on a machine at a time. A question becomes "how many new employees could we handle?". I looked at some solutions, but landed on an Excel spreadsheet with a small macro for spreadsheet setup, conditional formatting to call out an employee being allocated to 2 positions on the same shift, and a visual way to show for each operator, how long it takes to be fully trained. HR or a manager can setup training schedules by manually allocating people to training slots. There were some constraints the business wanted (train on machine #1 before #2, do 2 days of training if you haven't already trained on _x_ machine). They would have been hard to accommodate in a way the end user could configure, so I have a notes section they can fill in (and they have to manually observe these constraints). Totally open to other ideas people have on how to approach the proble.

mushufasa 7y ago
This sounds like a good solution to me. I can imagine some HN readers might comment 'ew Excel!' but it truly is the right tool for something where you have to transparently demonstrate the logic to non-technical stakeholders in a way they can easily edit and adapt. Of course, you could build or buy a web app that handles this specific scenario more powerfully and scaleably, but if this is a quarterly problem rather than a everyday problem then the additional overhead of the different interface / logins may not be worthwhile. My only comments would be 1) macros are too hard for nontechnical users in my experience, even just w/r/t setup (excel prompts you a security warning to enable macros that is scary). I think you could maybe do this using the what-if analysis tables, simple ifelse formulas, and conditional formatting. 2) another improvement might be a cloud-based version where there is a link at which others can easily view + collaborate, like Google Sheets or Airtable. I think Excel is supposed to have this feature as part of the 365 subscription but I've never used it.
cerved 7y ago
Using Excel sounds like a pain to maintain but if it works it works. Your problem sounds like a JSP (job shop scheduling problem). If it is you could use MiniZinc https://www.minizinc.org/ https://www.minizinc.org/ and look at Håkan Kjellstrans MiniZinc page http://www.hakank.org/minizinc/ http://www.hakank.org/minizinc/, it has a couple of different JSP models.

mushufasa 7y ago

This sounds like a good solution to me. I can imagine some HN readers might comment 'ew Excel!' but it truly is the right tool for something where you have to transparently demonstrate the logic to non-technical stakeholders in a way they can easily edit and adapt. Of course, you could build or buy a web app that handles this specific scenario more powerfully and scaleably, but if this is a quarterly problem rather than a everyday problem then the additional overhead of the different interface / logins may not be worthwhile. My only comments would be 1) macros are too hard for nontechnical users in my experience, even just w/r/t setup (excel prompts you a security warning to enable macros that is scary). I think you could maybe do this using the what-if analysis tables, simple ifelse formulas, and conditional formatting. 2) another improvement might be a cloud-based version where there is a link at which others can easily view + collaborate, like Google Sheets or Airtable. I think Excel is supposed to have this feature as part of the 365 subscription but I've never used it.

cerved 7y ago

Using Excel sounds like a pain to maintain but if it works it works. Your problem sounds like a JSP (job shop scheduling problem). If it is you could use MiniZinc https://www.minizinc.org/ https://www.minizinc.org/ and look at Håkan Kjellstrans MiniZinc page http://www.hakank.org/minizinc/ http://www.hakank.org/minizinc/, it has a couple of different JSP models.