Clarification on Hourly Production Quantities and Resource Utilization in Frepple

[mayankkulkarni-ctrl]

Hello Frepple Team,

I am currently working on a manufacturing planning use case using Frepple and would like to clarify some behavior related to time granularity in production planning and reporting.

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Context:

• I have defined:

  • Sales Orders (SO)
  • Manufacturing Orders (MO)
  • Operations with assigned resources

• Frepple successfully generates a feasible plan with:

• Start date/time of operations

• End date/time of operations

• Total production quantity

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Observation:

From my analysis of the data model and UI:

1. The OperationPlan object stores:

   • Quantity
   • Start datetime
   • End datetime

   However, it does not appear to store or expose any time-phased (e.g., hourly) production quantities.

2. The Resource report / Capacity view:

   • Displays utilization aggregated in time buckets (day/week/month)
   • Does not provide an option for hour-level buckets

3. While scheduling appears to be continuous (precise timestamps), the reporting layer seems to aggregate data at a higher level.

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Questions:

1. Does Frepple support deriving or accessing hour-by-hour production quantities for a manufacturing order natively?

2. Is there any configuration, extension, or API that allows:

   • Breaking down an operation plan quantity into hourly output
   • Viewing resource utilization at hourly granularity in the UI?

3. If not supported, is the recommended approach to:

   • Export operation plans (start/end/quantity)
   • Perform external post-processing (e.g., Python/Pandas) to derive hourly metrics?

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Expectation:

I want to confirm whether:

• There is an existing feature or best practice I may be missing.

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Goal:

To understand the correct approach for obtaining fine-grained (hour-level) production and utilization insights from Frepple.

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Thank you for your guidance!

[jdetaeye]

1. Does Frepple support deriving or accessing hour-by-hour production quantities for a manufacturing order natively?

The "manufacturing order summary" has such logic

2. Is there any configuration, extension, or API that allows:
   Breaking down an operation plan quantity into hourly output
   Viewing resource utilization at hourly granularity in the UI?

There are 2 features I can think of:

• When you set the parameter "display_time" to true, to see the details within the day. We don't show it by default.
• By default we create buckets for reporting the plan results by day, week, quarter and year.
  You can create extra buckets for shifts and hours if you want. Just populate the "admin/bucket" and "admin/bucket dates" tables:
  Buckets defined in this way show up in all standard frepple screens.
  

3. If not supported, is the recommended approach to:
   ...

Your use case can vary, but for the bulk of our customers a plan at daily granularity is sufficient.

My recommendation is not to go overboard with the detailed buckets unless it's critical in the planners' analysis & decision making process. In a majority of situations you'll find that the planner is thinking at a more aggregate level...