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I am evaluating various platforms to build a custom production scheduling application for a client.  Here are some details:

  1. Customers place orders for products they need produced
  2. Each order can have multiple line items for different products they would like produced
  3. Each order line item needs to be scheduled on one or more machines to be produced.
  4. The scheduled jobs for each line item need to be run sequentially, but not necessarily back-to-back.  In fact, some products need to sit for a set period of time after one job before it can be consumed by the next job to make the final product
  5. If the date of the first job scheduled for a line item needs to be adjusted ahead or back, the other subsequent jobs need to be adjusted by the same amount of time as well.  For example, if a customer orders “Product A”, which needs to run on “Machine 1” on 3/20, then “Machine 2” on 3/21, then “Machine 3” on 3/25, if the job scheduled on “Machine 1” is changed to start on 3/21, then the job on “Machine 2” needs to update to start on 3/22 and the job on “Machine 3” needs to update to start on 3/26.

If anyone has experience building a similar app, I would be interested in hearing about your experience using Airtable.

Otherwise, if anyone thinks that Airtable would not be a good platform for this type of application, I would be interested in that feedback as well.

I’ve also looked at ClickUp, which I think would work, but I think Airtable would provide a more open platform for adding new features in the future like Bills of Material, Routings, Inventory, etc…

Thank you.

I think Airtable could work. If I were to build it it would look something like this

Table structure:

  • orders
  • products listings (to lookup/reference the product listing)
  • order products (multiple products per order)
  • machines (for reference / listing of machines)
  • machine schedule management (aka sequencing machines and jobs by required by dates, FIFO etc)

When certain dates changes, an automation can trigger to update relevant job’s scheduled start date.

You could have a kanban board on the machines so you can see what job it is currently working on and what is scheduled next

I would also have an interface on top of this for better user experience, as the data in the tables can get complex

The sky is the limit in Airtable. Just need to keep in mind volume of transactions, integrations, number of users, etc for it to be scalable

​@cjlemmer 

Yes, this can all be done with Airtable.

For the customer “order entry” part of your workflow:

If you want your customers to submit their orders via a form, you’ll need to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable because Fillout allows your customers to create new linked records on a form (along with editing linked records on a form).

I demonstrate this feature on this Airtable podcast episode:

Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form, create custom PDF files from a form submission, accept payments on forms, pre-fetch dynamic data from an Airtable record, customize the style and branding of your form, customize a theme for your form, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, add a login page to your form, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, and much more.

I demonstrate a few more of Fillout’s advanced features on this Airtable podcast episode:

Alternatively, if want your customers to enter their orders through an interface page, you can use a customer portal:

One of your options is Airtable’s portals, which lets you add editors at a reduced cost. Note that this is still a very expensive add-on, and there is a minimum of 15 users.

Your other option is to use a 3rd-party portal, which are typically less expensive than Airtable’s portals. The most popular 3rd-party portals that are currently available for Airtable are:
Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, Glide, and MiniExtensions.

I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.

For your advanced automations:

You can use Make’s advanced automations for Airtable.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. 

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Hello 

we are starting a similar project : job and subjobs scheduling via Airtable and opc-ua orchestration via Node Red.

pleased to exchange on that.

marc

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