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A production line’s stations mean nothing until they are routed: picked, put in
visit order, and given an average wait time. That is what this screen does — and the membership
and order you set here are what scheduling and batch reports check against. Set it in
OJ Setup → Production → Line-Station Routing.
What, where, who, when, why
| What | The ordered list of stations that make up one production line, with an Average Wait (minutes) per station. One row per line-station pair. |
| Where | OJ Setup → Production → Line-Station Routing. The lines and stations themselves are created on the Production Line and Production Stations screens — this screen only wires them together. |
| Who | The person (or AI) setting up production. Operators never see it — they see its result as the station order in batch plans and shop-floor views. |
| When | When a line is created; when a station joins or leaves a line; when the real visit order changes and batch reports should follow it. |
| Why it matters | Scheduling throws “Production Line #, Production Station #, not found” if a unit’s parts sit on a station that is not routed onto the line — membership is load-bearing. Batch reports are generated per line-station pair, walking the route in this sequence. Avg Wait is carried onto every scheduled unit but no calculation reads it in this version. An unrouted line has no route for work to follow. |
Working with the screen
- Pick a line in the left-hand list — the routing editor and diagram fill with that line.
- Add a station from the Add Station combo (it lists every station not already on the
line — a station can sit on several lines, but only once per line). New rows go to the end of the
sequence. - Order them with the arrow buttons — Move Up / Move Down swap a row with its
neighbour. The diagram on the right redraws instantly, station cards joined by arrows with the wait
printed under each. - Edit Avg Wait by clicking the cell in the table. Blank or invalid text becomes 0.
- Remove a station with the trash button (after a confirmation). Nothing else is checked —
reports assigned to that line-station pair are not touched.
Each station card in the diagram also shows the station’s saws (from the
Saws screen) as code (machine code) lines, so the routing picture
doubles as a saw map of the line.
The three fields
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Seq | The visit order on this line (1, 2, 3…). Not typed directly — it changes only through Move Up / Move Down. New rows get the highest sequence so far, plus one. |
| Station | The station (read-only; picked from the combo when added). |
| Avg Wait | The station’s expected wait in minutes, shown on the routing diagram’s arrows. Stored to three decimals and copied onto each scheduled unit (whole-minute part), but no capacity calculation reads it in this version — treat it as documentation. |
Worked example — routing a “Weld line”
The line has four stations. After adding them and pressing Move Up/Down until the order is right, the
screen shows:
| Seq | Station | Avg Wait | What the system does with it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cut | 3.0 | Units start here; the scheduler allows ~3 min of wait per unit. |
| 2 | Weld | 7.5 | The bottleneck-looking step — the biggest wait on the line. |
| 3 | Glaze | 2.0 | |
| 4 | QC | 1.5 | Every unit’s last stop on this line before it leaves. |
With that saved, a batch planned on the Weld line lists its work under Cut → Weld → Glaze →
QC in that order, station reports are generated per line-station pair
walking that same sequence, and every scheduled unit is stamped with its station, line sequence and average
wait. Capacity itself comes from each station’s Capacity/Bottleneck flags and the
Shift windows — not from Avg Wait.
Who reads this routing
- Scheduling — checks that every station a unit’s parts sit on is routed onto the line
(missing station = “not found” error), and stamps each scheduled unit with its station,
line sequence and average wait. - Batch planning — the batch plan’s station list for an order is derived from the
line-station pairs its BOM actually touches. - Station reports — reports are assigned per line-station pair (see
Assigning a report to a station); a station on two lines can
carry different reports per line. - Shop-floor views — the operator’s view picker lists a line’s stations from this routing.
Removing a station from the middle leaves a gap in the sequence (2, 4, 5 is normal and harmless —
order is all that matters). Avg Wait does not affect capacity in this version — only each
station’s Capacity and Bottleneck flag and the Shift windows do. Delete has no checks — removing
a line-station pair does not warn about reports assigned to it. And the card’s Resource line is a
placeholder in this version; resources are not wired yet.