Production Tracker
The Production Tracker can be used to assign labor and cost data to any user identified activity; manage a synchronized copy of those activities and their additional cost and labor attributes to streamline the tracking and reporting workflows. This tool is not intended for tracking all activities in the plan, though you may decide to do so in certain situations. If your plan is built based on the best practices of Production System Design where you clearly identify Standard Activities and design a production system to maintain flow, this tool will prove effective for tracking production labor and rates against those Standard Activities.
This section explains the various Production Tracker features and tools. See this IGLC paper which provides an overview of Production Labor Tracking concepts.
When you first open the dialog for the first time, it will display an empty production tracking table. Note that the image below shows a populated production tracking table. You can interact with the tasks in the plan while this dialog is open to filter or identity which tasks should be added to the table.
Production Tracker (Main Menu: Tools/Production Tracker)
Using the Production Tracker
Adding Tasks to the Production Tracking Table: First isolate the tasks you want to track in the main plan using the Filter Dialog or the Search Dialog or any combination of those two tools. Then open the Production Tracker tool and select "File/Add Visible Tasks from Current Plan". vPlanner will add any tasks that are not already in the tracking table. Tasks that are already in the production tracking table will be ignored.
Changing the Default Report Type: The tool includes three predefined report types for reviewing Estimated Labor/Cost, Estimated, and Actual, among others. Use the Report Type pull down to change the kind of the report. Those report types predefine the visible columns for the desired workflow. See below how to customize the report type columns display.
Changing Default Columns: You may also customize the columns displayed in the standard reports using the Column Chooser.
Saving Column Visibility for Later Use: Make sure that the appropriate report type is selected before you make changes to column visibility. The changes will be associated with that report type and remembered next time you use vPlanner with that report type. You can save up to 3 report types.
Applying Filters and Sorting: You can enable column filters for the production tracking columns using the filter tool. Once column filters are enabled, you can apply any combinations of filters to isolate; for example the tasks for a particular floor, areas of work or company or a combination of those. You can roll back filters by selecting "All" in the column filter pull down. You can also sort by any column. Click on the column label to sort.
Exporting Data to Excel: Select the cells, rows, or the entire table, and use standard Copy / Paste commands to copy to Excel.
Editing Production Data: By default, cells that are gray colored are read only. Cells with white backgrounds indicate cells that you can edit if you have access permissions to modify those cells. See below:
· Level 5 Users have access to modify their company's tasks.
· Level 9 Users by default have the same access rights as Level 5 users. However, a Level 9 User can elevate their access to be full access from the interface to modify tasks from other companies.
· Estimated values can be modified as long as the task status is not complete or completed pending in the plan.
· Actual values can be modified after the task status is set to be complete or completed or completed pending in the plan.
To edit a cell, click on it and start typing. Typically you will fill in all the forecast information and you will fill in the actual data when tasks are completed in the plan. Once all edits are done, Save your changes from the File menu.
Printing: The printing interface is similar to the existing timeline view printing dialog.
Reports: Reporting is automatic. Simply enable the "Production Charts" tab at the bottom to switch to the charts view. You may customize the chart types by changing the menu options for Type, Data Options, Filter By, or Group By. Here are some examples:
