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Tips and Techniques Manufacturing Industries, Health Care Industries, and even the Department of Defense are all finding Gantt Charts to be a useful addition to their simulation model results. While standard ProModel reports, time series graphs, and even custom Excel plots are useful, nothing quite takes the place of a well organized Gantt Chart for conveying meaningful information to the reader. You have probably used a Gantt chart before in a scheduling program, like Microsoft Project or on some project you may have worked on in the past to show progress against a planned schedule. Gantt charts are very useful in showing relationships among tasks such as those that can be performed in parallel versus series with each other. They are also useful in showing a project’s critical path (the path, which if delayed, causes the whole project to be delayed) so that extra attention can be focused on those tasks.
In this first example, the Gantt chart is showing simulated results for part completions (green bars for family 1 parts) versus the black schedule bar. It’s obvious from the results that completions are taking much longer than planned; either due to resource contention, varying process times, or some other reason. In the second example (a hospital procedure room) the Gantt chart is showing the patient in-room time (procedure room), the procedure setup time, the two parts of the procedure, and the clean-up time. The black bar is the scheduled time allowed for the procedure (excluding set-up or clean-up) and can be compared with the actual time with variation and resource (Doctor, Nurse, Tech, and Equipment) delays from previous cases. We have also created Gantt charts of resource usage which makes it obvious when resources delay task from starting or completing on time. The Gantt chart has been very useful in showing how close procedures should be scheduled together and the duration of their scheduling (including turning the room around).
To produce Gantt charts from a model, several columns of start and stop times are written out to an Excel table through the export array command. From there a visual basic program is used to plot the Gantt charts in the custom format shown. Screen options control the width and length of the chart, the font sizes, bar colors, dates or items to be displayed. The Gantt chart program is really quite flexible in its design, however, with each new project approximately 1 day of modifications are required by our staff to make it totally custom for the project at hand. If you are interested in adding customized Gantt charts to your
model results then contact the ProModel Consulting Group at saleshelp@promodel.com or (888)900-3090 for more information. |
