In Manufacturing, Mining and many other industries, bulk commodities are received or delivered in batches or parcels of various sizes and with various properties.
Businesses are often required to schedule the usage of these commodities in quantities which differ from the deliveries. Often commodities are used on a First In First Out (FIFO) basis, or they may be scheduled to meet certain input qualities, ie: Constant or Min/Max of an input quality.
This post will give some basic ideas for this type of scheduling within Excel.
Scheduling First in First Out Usage
Unlike my previous posts, this post will not be walking the reader through the actual scheduling or setup of the worksheet, but will look at each section of the scheduling process and discuss the relevant points where appropriate with reference to the implementation in Excel.
The Scheduling Workbook, Page Sched1 shows a simple FIFO schedule using an Iron Ore mine as an example.
Each section below is highlighted in the sample workbook.
Section 1. Inputs
Various parcels of Iron Ore are presented in order of delivery to a plant or as mined.
Each parcel is of a different sizes (Tonnage) as well as having various qualities of 3 different properties, namely the Iron (Fe), Silicon (Si) and Aluminum (Al) content. These are expressed as percentages but could be Kg/t etc.
Parcels may further be categorized as High, Medium or Low Grade.
From a production point of view it is important to know how much feed is required to meet a certain output from a process or what the quality of mixtures will be.
Section 2. Production Schedule
The mine/plant has a production schedule, ie: a quantity of Iron Ore that it is expected to mine or process every month. The schedule may have ups/down to reflect shutdowns, holidays, changes in rosters/workforce etc.
Section 3. Schedule
This part does the mechanics of the actual scheduling, allocating parcels of each block until the monthly requirement is met.
In operation it takes the minimum of the size of each parcel minus what has already been processed from that parcel or the production requirement minus what has already been processed that month.
This is done using a simple Min and Sum formula.
Example: K18: =MIN($C18-SUM($I18:J18),K$6-SUM(K$9:K17))
Conditional formatting is used to highlight the cell as a scheduled cell (tonnes > 0)
Example: Conditional Formatting, Cell Value > 0
Section 4. Reporting
Reporting can be prepared for Month by month production, Cumulative from the start or Remaining until the end.
Sum and Sumproduct formula are used to calculate weighted average for elemental grades as you have the quantity of each parcel, each month and the associated grades in the input areas.
Example: Cumulative %Fe in April 10, K36: =SUMPRODUCT(K$10:K$31,$E$10:$E$31)/K$35
More complex Sumproduct formula are used to report by various classifications.
Examples:
Used High grade tonnage in march, J53: =SUMPRODUCT(1*($D$10:$D$31=$I52),(J$10:J$31))
Used Medium grade %Fe in April 10, K59: =IF(K58>0,SUMPRODUCT(1*(($D$10:$D$31)=$I57)*(K$10:K$31),($E$10:$E$31))/K$58,0)
Section 5. Charting
Having produced a schedule and associated reports you now have a large amount of data which can be plotted to suit requirements.
The Next Step
Once a schedule has been achieved you can feed the production quantities directly into a budget or other downstream system as required.
Scheduling Random or Planned Usage to Achieve Goals
Although the above example, Sched1, is simplistic, First In First Out schedules can and are used in real life. However often some degree of stockpiling is allowed.
This means that parcels can be used in a different order to which they are delivered.
Often this is done so that the input quality of the feed source is varied or maintained, ie Averaged at a level, maintained below or above a level or maximised or minimized according to constraints.
The Scheduling example file, page Sched2 offers a simple manual way to account for this.
Sched2 varies from Sched1 in that it allows manual selection of the order in which parcels are processed.
This is done by simply allowing the user to specify which order parcels will be treated.
The spreadsheet then does all the work with the added benefit of tracking stockpile levels, as often these must be maintained at certain levels.
The spreadsheet has the same reporting and charting functions available as in Sched1.
Summary
In both the examples the scheduling is done using simple, Sum’s, Min and Max formulas.
The actual scheduled production is highlighted using conditional formatting.
The reporting is done using Sum and Sumproduct formulas.
In both examples adjust the values in the various Yellow cells and watch the scheduled tonnages and qualities change.
Next
The purpose of this post was simply to introduce the reader to simple options for scheduling.
It is clear that you now have a simple process from which to derive inputs to a budget, tracking and prediction reports
The post doesn’t attempt to go anywhere near optimization of the schedule using linear programming or other techniques.
However you can see that the addition of Excel solver may be possible to attempt to balance or minimise or maximise outputs, but this is beyond this simple example.
Functions Used:
Min: =Min(Range) returns the Minimum number from the Range
Max: =Max(Range) returns the Maximum number from the Range
Sum: =Sum(Range) adds the values in the Range
If: =If(Condition, Do this if condition is true, Do this if condition is false)
Sumproduct: http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/11/10/excel-sumproduct-formula/
How do you Schedule your production scenarios? Let us all know in the comments below:
Next week: Word Art – Yes it has a use !
24 Responses to “10 Supercool UI Improvements in Excel 2010”
The best improvement by far is the Collapse Ribbon ^ button !
Kind of a shame that some of the best improvements are actually returns to old functionality. One thing I don't like is that to get to recent files I need to do an extra click after File - apart from Save As, that's why I'm usually in the File menu. I like the sparkline options, though they are still as not fully featured as some of the free and pay options out there.
The collapse button for the ribbon menu is good news. Can you make the ribbon menus stick too?
Nine improvements, not ten. You can also select multiple objects in 2007. Click on the Find & Select item at the far right of the Home tab, and the dropdown looks remarkably like your 2010 screenshot.
@Jon.. Thank you. Dumb me, I somehow thought we couldnt select objects in Excel 2007. Just saw the "select menu" and it is there. I have corrected the post and removed the point. I have added the "you can make your own ribbons" instead. Thanks once again.
@Arti: what do you mean by make ribbons stick?
@Alex: May be it is my installation, but when I go to "File menu" I see "recent files" by default.
For example, if I am working with one of the contextual ribbon menus (Pivot tables, Drawing/Chart etc), as soon as I click away from the selected object, the menu tabs vanish. If I click on the object again immediately, then Excel will remember what I was looking at, but if I wander away and click on a Pivot, then back again on the Chart, the menus will 'appear' but not get activated, thereby causing much annoyance and additional clicking.
I want to "pin" the whole menu (not invididual commands) somehow, so that I can have the menu there for the length of the time I am working with graphics. Excel 2003 used to have the Drawing toolbar you could detach and hover while you were working, but this functionality disappeared in Excel 2007.
My thought was Excel should just allow a 'pin', similar to the Recently Opened files menu, for the Ribbon Menus as well. If I have not selected any Drawing object, the commands can be greyed out, but I want the menu as a whole to 'stick'.
@Arti... I think MS solved this problem differently. When I select a pivot and go to "design" tab Excel 2010 remembers this and automatically takes me to "design" tab when I reselect the pivot.
Apart from this you can also define your own ribbon with all the things you normally do. See the above article (I have added this after Jon's comments)
Nice feature. About time for a upgrade for MS Office
Oh... okay. That might be a start. I'd probably just copy-paste the Drawing tab haha. Thanks. I'll definitely give Excel 2010 a try.
Btw - have you considered getting into / gotten into the world of Excel as it meets SharePoint?
Actually, the replacement new thing is probably better than all the rest. One thing that the designers of the Office 2007 ignored was allowing regular users to customize their own interface. Office 2010's interface was expanded in this way to address the huge uproar.
Is there still a limit on how many things you can add to the QAT bar? (I'm too lazy to look myself.)
@Jeff.. it seems to take quite a few, but only shows one line and gives a little arrow button at the end. (summary: shucks!)
The best thing is you can edit the ribbon directly from excel, so now i can create my own bar with just the things I use regularly!
One of the annoying things in 07 for me is the Add-Ins menu bar - in 03 I could keystroke directly to menu add ins.. In 07 I needed an extra keystroke just to activate the add-in menu, then the keystrokes as normal.. Hope this marek sense..
John -
If you remember the old Excel 2003 Alt-key shortcuts, you can still use them in 2007. To get to the Add-In dialog:
Alt-T-I
Dear Arti & Chandoo
Seen your comments over some issues. Hope you are form India, gone through your comment expecting a pin to command it as a whole, great, hope if someone out of MS have read it, it may be kept in mind while the next R & D of Office Ver. 16
Just incase someone forgot CTRL+F1 will collapse the ribbon.
[...] was pleasantly surprised when I ran Microsoft Excel 2010 for first time. It felt smooth, fast, responsive and looked great on my [...]
I like the sparklines, and the ability to modify the charts
How do you get rid of the advertisment on the right hand side? If you upgrade then will it take off the ads?
Once again Microsoft has re-decorated the Office and we are NOT pleased!
The graphics object selector can be found in the Home ribbon under Find & Select, Select Objects near the bottom of the drop down. You can make it part of the Quick Access toolbar by right click over it and selecting Add to Quick Access toolbar.
The graphics "cursor" will now appear on the mini-toolbar at the top left of the window.
How to get rid of "Add-Ins" button in Backstage (File)" menu by means of XML code, i.e. to hide, to delete or to disable this button?
This button is usually situated in the Backstage menu between "Help" and "Options" buttons.
Vladimir, did you ever get an answer to your question?
I am tying to customize the ribbon UI for a file using XML, and this is precisely the piece I can't figure out. I can hide other tabs, remove items from QAT and backstage - all except the options that are showing up under add-ins in backstage. If there is an XML syntax for referencing this thing and making it invisible, I cannot find it.
Hey, nice tutorial. Please check my video tutorial on similar topic at the below link and provide your comments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeIFc0jYjpA