Using Air Table For Daily Workload

[Office_Personne]

We currently use Air Table to enter our customers purchase orders- creating Work Orders for our warehouse. Within that **Work Order, we enter date created, due date, and any "Stations (A,B,C,D,E) that each Work Order will need to get work completed at- along with some other details not relevant to this topic.

What we need is a way utilizing Air Table to do the following-

• I need EACH Work Order # to show on the schedule for every day beginning with “Date Entered” and ending with “Date Due.”

• Also need each Work Order to show on the schedule as I stated above- for EACH “Station” (A,B,C,D,E) for each day beginning with “Date Entered” to “Date Due”

For example-

Work Order # 10000 entered on 5/1/2022- and due on 5/16/2022 - and will need work completed at Station A, Station D, and Station E.(For this example- assume there are 5 “Stations” A,B,C,D,E

Work Order # 10001 entered on 5/1/2022 and due on 5/31/2022- for Stations A, C

Work Order # 10002 entered on 5/2/2022 and due on 5/24/2022- Stations A, D, E

Work Order # 10003 entered on 5/2/2022 and due on 5/17/2022- Stations A, B

And so on- (We have over 600+ Work Orders active any given time)

With that data- i need Work Order # 10000 to show up on the daily schedule for Station A, Station D, and Station E for each day from May 1 (Date Entered) through May 16. (Date Due)
And the same for each Work Order that is currently “open”.

The goal is to look at each day- and identify days that we are overloaded in any particular station, with potentially completing the work order for any given station on a “lighter” day between Date Entered and Date Due.

I appreciate anyone’s assistance that can help me with this challenge.

We currently use Grid view- but am open to using any “view” that will help us with this tracking each day.

[ScottWorld]

That’s relatively challenging. From an Airtable point of view, that could only be setup with a many-to-many relationship, which is described here:

Airtable Support

Airtable's guide to many-to-many relationships

What sets Airtable apart from ordinary spreadsheet applications is its ability to link related concepts together. Knowing how to represent the relationships between different groups of objects can ...

You could manually type in all the data into your junction table, but off the top of my head, getting the data entry done in a more user-friendly way that doesn’t require a lot of manual data entry would probably require scripting or automation with a platform like Make.com.

Although if there’s only 5 stations to choose from, you could probably automate this with 5 different station fields and 5 different automations.

Maybe someone else can type up a lengthier response for you, but if you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you create this, please feel free to contact me through my website:

ScottWorld • Best Airtable Consultants, Airtable Experts, Airtable Consulting,...

ScottWorld • Best Airtable Consultants, Airtable Experts, Airtable...

ScottWorld provides the world's best Airtable consultants, expert Airtable training, best Airtable consulting, and Claris FileMaker Pro developers.

[Office_Personne]

Thank you for the quick response. I am not sure if the company would want to commit any $$ to this just yet. I am going to try to work my way to a solution first- and see if I can make any progress.
We have a total of 9 “stations” that any work order could need.

I, myself, am new to Air Table- but the company I work for- uses it for each station to know which work orders are coming their way.

I simply would like to have a live snapshot for our warehouse managers to at any given time- see “heavy/ busy” days and move work orders around accordingly to lighten up days where we have more work than hours/ manpower available.

[ScottWorld]

Yep, you’ll only be able to do this with a many-to-many relationship.

[Office_Personne]

Can you define a “Many to Many” relationship?
Thank you!

[ScottWorld]

I gave you the link above.

[Alexey_Gusev]

Hi
You should try Timeline or maybe Calendar view.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

I’ve come up with a solution for you, but unfortunately it requires a Pro account for the Timeline view

You can find it here and you can duplicate the base to see the exact formulas and automations

The workflow basically involves you filling out a form with the Work Order Number, Date Entered, Date Due, and selecting the stations needed.

On submission of said form, the automation will create a linked record for each selected station in the Station Tasks table.

You can then view all the ongoing work orders, grouped by the stations via a Timeline view, which I think is what you’re looking for.

Let me know what you think

[momentsgoneby80]

Hi @Office_Personnel
You’ve gotten some great answers in here. I would like to toss in a “low” tech version that I tested just cause your question intrigued me and I had an instant approach different than the one in the previous answers that didn’t require automations, scripts, PRO accounts or other platforms. The trade off is that it’s not as fancy as other solutions and it doesn’t give you a day by day overview, just the span overview.

I built a test base that you can copy and examine

Airtable

Orders & Stations Example Base - Airtable

Explore the "Orders & Stations Example Base" base on Airtable.

It uses just linked field a between “stations overview” and “orders” and filters and rollups and views to do the rest.
Each station has an own view under orders where orders within range and yet not filled are visible.

@Adam_TheTimeSavingCo and @ScottWorld are much more versed in Airtable and ALL the solutions, but hopefully this helps you or someone else in some way.