Scheduling and availability
How working hours, weekends, holidays, availability events, and absences combine to decide when work can be placed.
Whether a request fits somewhere is capability matching; whether it fits at that time is availability. Several layers combine — from the site’s calendar down to a single person’s sick day — and both manual validation and auto-scheduling respect the result.
The site calendar
Configured per site in Settings → Scheduling (“Configure working hours, weekends, holidays, and off-times for this site.”):
- Timezone — “All scheduling calculations use this timezone.”
- Working Hours — “Define the working day. Time outside these hours is not counted as working time.”
- Weekends — “When enabled, Saturday and Sunday are excluded from working time.”
- Public Holidays — pick a country/region and its public holidays are excluded automatically.
Together these define the site’s working time — the raw material utilization is measured against and schedules are placed into. Details in Scheduling settings.
Availability events
Availability events model exceptions: “Define periods when no work should be scheduled (closures, maintenance, etc.).” Each event has a Type (Public holiday, Shutdown, Maintenance, Custom), a period, an optional recurrence rule (RRULE — a yearly Christmas shutdown is one event, not thirty), and a Default effect:
- Closed — “All resources closed unless overridden.”
- Available — “All resources available unless overridden.”
Overrides flip the default for specific targets — a single Resource, a Resource group, or a whole Resource type. A plant shutdown can close everything while the maintenance workshop group stays available.
When several rules speak, the most specific wins: a resource-level override beats its group’s, which beats its type’s, which beats the event’s default effect.
Person-level availability
People add two layers of their own (see People, teams and skills):
- Base Availability (%) and Allocation Mode — how much of the working calendar a person offers, and whether assignments consume it exclusively or fractionally.
- Absences — vacation, sickness, training, and the rest. An absence simply removes that time from the person’s availability.
Request-side time constraints
Requests can narrow their own placement with Scheduling Constraints — an Earliest Start and/or Latest End — and containers can impose a Boundary Window on their children. These are promises the scheduler keeps, not hints.
Where it all lands
- Validation — placements that break availability are named precisely: Overlaps with off-time, Overlaps with a holiday, Overlaps with a non-working weekend.
- Auto-scheduling — the solver never proposes into unavailable time.
- Utilization math — “No capacity configured for this period.” on Insights means this layer is missing: utilization is scheduled time ÷ available time, and available time comes from everything above.