The Shop Floor Insight dispatch list should show operators the work that is relevant to their station, role, and current production window. A productive dispatch list is usually a small, focused list rather than hundreds of open routing lines.

Dispatch filtering can be applied at several levels:

• Client Configuration Dispatch Filter: filters work shown at a specific scanning station.
  • Most commonly these are filters to work centers, machine centers, or sometimes specific operations, however any field that is on the production order routing line can be used to filter.   Routing Status is also a common filter to exclude operations that have been finished, or to exclude operations that are flagged as in-progress depending on the goal of the dispatch list for that work center.
  • Client configurations can also be used to be employee specific and then assigned at the Shop Floor Employee card as an alternative.
• Global Dispatch filters: apply date and custom routing/task filters to all dispatch lists.
  • Global dispatch filters are commonly used to exclude certain dates, or exclude steps that are sub-contracted, or other steps that may not need to be shown.  Global filters work in addition to the client specific filters.
  • Global filters can also be used to apply employee level filtering as well, which can limit the work displayed in the dispatch based on assignments.

The dispatch view can be used to manually clock on and off production order operations or job tasks when a barcode is not available.

As a best practice use the dispatch list as a focused operational queue. Do not use it as an unfiltered list of every released production order operation.

Configure a station-specific dispatch filter

Use this when each scanning station should show only the work centers or machine centers near that station.

1. Open Shop Floor Client Configurations.
2. Create or open the configuration for the scanning station.
3. Set Filter Active.
4. Set Filter Type to IP.
5. Set Filter to the fixed IP address for the scanning station.
6. Set Ranking Order as needed.
7. Set the Production Dispatch Filter to the work centers or machine centers near that station.

Best practices

Keep dispatch filters practical:

• Filter each physical station to nearby work centers or machine centers for client configurations that represent scanning stations or are physically present at specific work centers.
• Use global date filters to remove old or future work that operators should not start, especially when released production orders may be long lived or released before they should be worked on in the shop floor.
• Exclude finished routing lines when released production orders are not always finished promptly if the process fits, this requires that the routing status on the production order line is maintained.
• Use assignment filtering when supervisors dispatch work to specific employees, or when employees self-assign with the take/un-take options on the shop floor.
• Keep a default/fallback Client Configuration.
• Avoid showing hundreds of dispatch lines to production users, showing information that is not relevant or not actionable to that work station will not improve productivity.  The dispatch list should be configured to show work that is relevant to that scanning station.