Find and fix problems in the schedule
One list of everything wrong with the board, and the one-click fixes for the problems that have one.
Three separate things can be wrong with a schedule: a machine booked twice, a material two jobs both need, and work that will not land on time. The board finds all three and lists them in one panel.
The panel is a read surface with buttons. It never blocks an edit, and it changes nothing until you press a fix.
Before you start
- Production Scheduler is part of the Scheduling Engine module. The tab strip renders for every organization, so seeing the Scheduler tab is not proof you are entitled to it. If you are not sure, contact IoTFlows.
- Schedule issues live on the Gantt. The other four views do not carry the pill. See Gantt view.
Open Schedule issues
The pill sits in the row above the chart, after the Gantt's display pills and before Simulations. It reads 3 issues in amber when the board has problems and No issues in slate when it does not. Click it to open the panel underneath.
The issues pill. The count is distinct work orders, so one work order with two problems counts once.
The count is distinct work orders, not findings. A task that is both double-booked and past due is one thing to go and look at, so it adds one to the pill and appears in two sections of the list.
The list says the same thing in every grouping. Each engine reads the machine, the materials and the dependencies off the work order itself rather than off the lanes on screen, so grouping by job or by operator cannot make a clash disappear.
It does read only what the board loaded. Filters and search change the set of work orders the board fetches, so narrowing to one department narrows the sweep with it. See Filter and search.
How the list is ordered
The panel groups rows into sections, one per kind and subject, ordered worst first: conflicts, then violations, then the two at-risk sections, meaning work the board expects to miss its date. Each section header carries its icon, its subject and a count, for example Double-booked: Machine: Haas VF-2.
The two at-risk sections come last and open folded. On a busy floor almost everything is past due, and an open list of 200 overdue rows pushes the rows somebody can act on off the card. Click a header to fold or unfold it.
The issues panel. At-risk sections come last and are folded, so the rows you can act on stay visible.
Every row names the work order, states the problem in one sentence, and carries a crosshair button that scrolls the chart to that bar and selects it. A double-booked row also prints the window the two jobs overlap, so you can cross-read it against the board.
Conflicts: double-booked machines
A task is double-booked when another scheduled, unfinished task needs the same machine over an overlapping stretch of time. It is the amber family, and today the only resource it watches is the machine on the work order.
The detail sentence names up to three of the other jobs: Needs the same machine as #1042 and #1043 at the same time. Under it sits the overlap window.
Three kinds of work occupy nothing and are never flagged: completed tasks, tasks with no due date, and tasks with no machine assigned. Bars that meet end to end do not conflict either, since the sweep allows a second of slack.
Violations: piece conflicts
A violation is a physical fact the schedule breaks rather than a timing clash. Violations are rose, and they are warn-only: the board flags them and still saves the edit that caused them.
A piece conflict is the common one: two work orders hold the same serialized piece over the same window. A serialized piece is one physical object, a specific bar, roll or sheet tracked individually in Inventory, so the clash is real however different the two machines are. See Serialized pieces.
You do not need to author anything to get these. Piece conflicts are computed from the reservations already in Inventory, so any two jobs needing the same piece surface here on their own.
A piece conflict. Two jobs need the same physical piece, computed from Inventory with no rule authored.
Holders the board cannot see still count. A maintenance work order or one filtered out by status occupies the piece, widens the window and is named under Not on this board with a link, but is never flagged itself, because it has no bar to ring.
Reservations are unioned by part, not by location. Moving a bar to another shelf does not make it two bars.
Tooling in use
Reusable tooling is the other live violation. A rack, tube or fixture set is an ordinary inventory item marked reusable, reserved through a task's required parts, and it has a real count: 6 FX-220 Vise Jaw Set needed at once, but only 4 are available in this window.
Asking for more than the plant owns is worded differently and has no fix, because no amount of moving creates an eleventh set: This work order needs 12 FX-220 Vise Jaw Set, but only 10 exist. Split the job, raise the capacity per unit, or get more.
Both kinds read real dates rather than bar positions, so they stay true in Sequence view, where the bars carry no time axis. See the capacity lane for the same occupancy drawn over time.
At risk: overdue
At risk is the red family, and Past due is the simpler half of it. It means the due date has passed and the task is not complete.
The detail gives the date and the age: Was due Sep 12, 3:00 PM, 8 days ago.
At-risk rows carry no fix, on purpose. Moving an overdue job's date is a judgment call about a commitment you made to a customer, not a repair the board can make for you.
At risk: waiting on a late predecessor
A late predecessor is an unfinished task this one depends on that cannot finish before this one is due to start. The board takes the later of the predecessor's due date and right now, and compares that with this task's start.
The detail names them: #1031 and #1034 cannot finish before this is due to start.
It stays a separate section from Past due because the remedy is different. A late predecessor is a sequencing problem you fix by moving one of the two bars or dropping the link; a past-due date is a promise you have already missed.
Quick fixes
Sections you can act on carry a button on each row, wearing that row's color. The label names what it will do, for example Move to when Haas VF-2 is free.
A quick fix moves the task to the earliest slot when the machine frees.
A fix writes one work order: a new due date and an explicit Time Estimate. It goes into the undo history, so Ctrl+Z puts it back. If the write fails you get Update failed, reverted and the bar returns to where it was.
The search respects the things you would expect it to. It starts no earlier than now, waits for every scheduled predecessor to finish, lands inside shift hours when Working hours is on, and counts holders that are not on the board as occupants.
A fix is offered only when there is one. No button appears on a locked bar, on a task with no due date, when the earliest free slot is where the task already sits, or when the demand is larger than the plant owns.
What does a fix write to a ~1h bar? A real 60-minute Time Estimate. A task drawn as an hour because nobody gave it a duration comes back carrying that hour as a number somebody chose, so put real estimates on the work before you start fixing it. See Create a production work order.
The same fix appears as a rose entry on a bar's right-click menu when the bar has a rule violation. A double-booking's fix lives in the panel only. And the board warns you before you create the problem: drag a bar onto a window where a piece or a tool is already taken and the drag ghost grows a rose line saying so, without stopping the drop.
Inside a Simulation a fix is staged rather than written, so it joins the draft and waits for Commit. See Try a schedule change without saving it.
Issue kinds
| Kind | Section | Color | Means | Quick fix |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Double-booked | Conflicts | Amber | Two scheduled tasks need the same machine over the same stretch of time | Moves the task to the earliest slot when that machine frees |
| Piece in two places at once | Violations | Rose | Two work orders hold the same serialized piece over the same window | Moves the task to the earliest slot when the piece frees |
| Tooling in use | Violations | Rose | More units of a reusable tool are needed at once than are free in the window | Moves the task to the earliest slot when enough units free up |
| Tooling in use, more than exists | Violations | Rose | The task alone reserves more units than the plant owns | None. Split the job or buy more |
| Past due | At risk, folded | Red | The due date has passed and the task is not complete | None, on purpose |
| Predecessor is late | At risk, folded | Red | A task this one depends on cannot finish before it is due to start | None, on purpose |
The panel also carries wording for machine-eligibility rules and material shortages. Those arrive with authored scheduling rules, which are not shipped, so no board produces them today.
Reading the colors on the board
The panel is a legend for the board rather than a second vocabulary. Every color in it means the same thing on a bar.
The board's color language: red at risk, amber double-booked, rose rule violation.
Color language
| Color | On the board | In the panel |
|---|---|---|
| Red | The whole bar surface turns red | The Past due and Predecessor is late sections and their icons |
| Amber | Diagonal stripes across the bar and a warning triangle beside the title | The Double-booked sections, their count chips and their fix buttons |
| Rose | A thin ring around the bar and a shield icon beside the title | The violation sections, their count chips and their fix buttons |
| Blue | A ring, meaning the bar is selected | Not used |
A selection ring wins over a violation ring, so selecting a violating bar hides its rose edge until you click away. Amber stripes and a rose ring sit on the same bar happily, because sharing a machine and sharing a bar of steel are two different problems with two different remedies.
The left rail carries the same two icons on a group header when anything inside it is flagged, and a bar's hover tooltip repeats the detail with the partner work orders named.
When the list is empty
The pill stays on screen at zero. It turns slate, swaps its triangle for a shield with a tick and reads No issues, and the panel says Nothing is wrong with this schedule. That is the point of an ungated surface: somewhere to look to confirm the board is clean, rather than something that only appears once it is not.
Work the conflicts and violations, and leave at risk folded. Those two are schedule mistakes with mechanical fixes, and clearing them takes minutes. Overdue is a commitment problem, and no amount of dragging bars will fix it.
Empty means clean for the work the board loaded and for the three things it checks. It is not a promise about material you never reserved, or about a department your filters left out.
See also
The Optimize pill on the scheduler Gantt computes a constraint-aware plan and draws it as dashed indigo ghost bars with a banner reading violations and span before and after. Nothing is written until you click Apply, which saves every included move as one undoable batch. Completed, locked and in-progress work is pinned and never moves, and a scoped run on a selection holds the rest of the board fixed and plans the selection around it. Clicking a ghost skips that move, so you can apply part of a proposal.
Turn a CSV or Excel export from your ERP into scheduled jobs. The importer runs as a six-step wizard: Upload, Read file, Check columns, Match people, Preview and Import. Only Job / Order number and Task name have to be mapped; rows sharing an order number become one job, and each row becomes one task under it. Column detection, date parsing and status translation all run in your browser. Parts the file names but your organization does not have are created automatically, which is the main source of duplicate parts, so the preview and the post-import cleanup both matter.