Activities are things that people do!

By setting up activities correctly within MES-M and with the right granularity, you can help build a detailed picture of what the workforce are doing on the shopfloor to aid continuous improvement, including what non value add activities can be reduced and what value add activities can be improved.

You can:

• Distinguish between value add/direct activities and non value add/indirect activities (and control which activities the operators can easily select from the workstation).
• Group activities to aid trend analysis and identify potential continuous improvement opportunities.
• Set the correct controls against specific activities to ensure that only people with the right skills are able to book time against them.
• Set controls against activity to ensure that users can only do one thing at a time if applicable.
• Set controls to ensure that if someone books onto this activity they must add more information for trend analysis (e.g. ‘Training’, requires details of what training done).

Activity Group

Activities can be grouped for reporting purposes. An activity can only belong to one activity group.

Direct and Indirect Activities

Direct activities:  Activities that are undertaken to make an item or job such as, machining, assembly, inspection, mixing, blending, picking and kitting. Direct activities make up the value add part of utilisation measure in the overall labour effectiveness (OLE) calculation.

Indirect activities: Activities that are not linked to a specific item or job such as, training, meeting, breakdown repair, maintenance, health and safety check, cleaning and project work. Indirect activities make up the defined part of utilisation losses in the OLE calculation.

Advanced activities: This is a non-standard configuration and very rarely used. It allows for unusual configurations where work is job related, but not item related or where the same activity can be both direct and indirect.

This documentation will focus only on direct and indirect activities.

Direct Activities

1. Navigate to the Activities screen and click the Add button. Note that some fields are not displayed when adding activity compared with editing an activity.
2. Complete the New Activity screen.

New/Edit Activity screen 

The following properties can be defined for the input screen:

Blue fields in the form are required. An asterisk in the list below defines just those fields that are always required, irrespective of the issue type configuration.

Fields displayed when creating a new direct activity

• Type*: Any activities that you intend to reference within workflows must be set as the activity type ‘Direct’.
• Suid*: Customers may want labour productivity/bookings data to go back to their ERP – you might need to reference a corresponding activity code from ERP here to specify the mapping.
• Name*: This is the identifier for the activity within Eyelit MES.
• Description: Provide a description for the activity.
• Activity Group*: For reporting.
• Work Centre Group*: This sets the default work centre group in the operation node when you select the activity. If you know that this activity is typically only associated with a set group of work centres you can set this here to make operation configuration easier. 

Note that in older versions, the work centres in the group here must also be linked to the line config for any workflows that you want to reference this activity in, otherwise the activity may not appear in the activity drop down in the operation node.

• Enabled*: Available for use. Options: Yes (default), No.
• Operator Exclusive*: Options:
  • Yes (default): If an operator is booked to this activity they cannot do another activity at the same time. 
  • No: They can book to another activity concurrently.

Indirect Activities

1. Navigate to the Activities screen and click the Add button. Note that some fields are not displayed when adding activity compared with editing an activity.
2. Complete the New Activity screen.

New/Edit Activity screen

The following properties can be defined for the input screen:

Blue fields in the form are required. An asterisk in the list below defines just those fields that are always required, irrespective of the issue type configuration.

Fields displayed when creating a new indirect activity

• Type*: Any activities that are not directly related to workflows/work on inventory items are ‘Indirect’.
• Suid*: Customers may want labour productivity/bookings data to go back to their ERP – you might need to reference a corresponding activity code from ERP here to specify the mapping.

This might be especially relevant if customers are creating indirect activities to track project work or maintenance activities linked to specific cost centres.

• Name*: This is the identifier for the activity within Eyelit MES.
• Description: Provide a description for the activity.
• Activity Group*: For reporting.
• Work Centre Group*: This determines at which workstations the activity is available.
• Enabled*: Available for use. Options: Yes (default), No.
• Operator Exclusive*: Recommendation is to always set this to Yes for indirect work. This is because you want this activity to be clearly segregated from a direct activity and if the setting here is exclusive, the system will enforce this. For example, if an operator books maintenance activity the system will ensure that they don’t forget to finish that activity before they book back onto direct work.
• Unpaid*: Some customers track unpaid time. It is subtracted from the paid element of your OLE calculation. For example, 8hrs is your shift duration, but 30 minutes lunch is taken out of your paid hours making the paid component 7h30min. Options: Yes, No (default).
• Requires Comment*: If Yes the operator will be prompted to add more information, e.g., for this example it could be the specific machine they are cleaning.

Activities Skills