Within the Agile Manufacturing domain, the DELMIA Ortems Planning module provides a useful and efficient functionality known as Mass Modifications. There is a Modes tab on the control ribbon of every Gantt chart within the Planning that enables the planner to concurrently update or modify large numbers of Operations or Work Orders (WOs).
To apply Mass Modifications to Operations or WOs we need to enable the Multiple selection mode. Clicking on Multiple selection will activate (and highlight) this mode. You then have three ways in which you can select the Operations or WOs you wish to modify or update: Select manually, Select filtered op. and Select highlighted op.
For this example, we will use Select filtered op. (details about the other Multiple selection types and using the Filter functionality within the Planning module can be found within the online help of the software). Using Select filtered op. enables you to select all Operations or WOs that you have previously filtered.
Below are 15 filtered WOs displayed on a WO Gantt Chart, each with a quantity of 1000, that you wish to modify the Earliest Start Date and the Priority. Once you have chosen Multiple Selection -> Select filtered op. all 15 of these filtered WOs are selected simultaneously, identified by the thin orange border visible around each WO.
You can then right-click anywhere on the Gantt chart (except in the margin) and choose what you wish to do with these 15 filtered WOs. Note that the right-click menu will have a number of options greyed-out as not all of the options available can be applied to multiple WOs at once. Among the options available within this menu, the Modify option is key as it allows Mass Modification of the selected WOs.
Choosing the Modify option of the right-click menu will open a Change Selection window with all the filtered Operations or WOs present (unless no records were returned by your filter).
Within the Change selection window (presented with two tabs: Operations and WOs) the Edit Mode button offers you to choose the way you wish to make changes to the selected elements:
- Globally (the default, with the Edit Mode button deselected) by changing the values in the fields displayed below the list of Operations or WOs. For example, the Earliest Start Date field has been selected on the WO tab and can therefore be modified for all of the filtered WO’s.
- Individually (the Edit Mode must be selected) by manually setting new values in the modifiable columns (titled in bold) within either the Operations or WOs tabs. Selecting the Edit Mode will hide the fields displayed below the list of Operations or WOs. In the example below the Priority of the filtered WOs have each been modified individually.
Once you are done with your changes, click OK to validate them into your Planning.
Note that if you click Edit Mode to switch from one mode to another after you had already made some changes, those changes will be lost.
It is also important to understand that with a WO filter, you can update data in the filtered WOs, but also in all the filtered WOs operations. With an Operation filter, you can update data in the filtered operations, but also data in their respective WOs. The entities that will be updated (Operations or WOs) will depend on which tab is active in the Change selection window.
