Naming Blueprints and Smart Blueprints

Blueprints and smart blueprints are used on the Planning board to schedule events.
Important
Before creating too many blueprints and smart blueprints, we recommend that you create a handful of blueprints using your most frequent scheduling scenarios first, and then apply them on the Planning board where they will be utilized so you can better gauge whether specific product templates are needed for each product, customer, product quantities, or whether some general templates will suffice in some instances, or all of the above. Additionally, starting with a small subset will help determine the best naming convention for each.

Generally, a smart blueprint should have a meaningful and concise label so that the scheduler creating the events on the Planning board can quickly identify the smart blueprint. The active blueprint within the smart blueprint creates the event with the applicable jobs and order requirements. The blueprint, however, may need to be more specific depending on the ultimate goal.

For example suppose the scheduler has created the “Chocolate Bars Q3” blueprint with an effective date of 7/1/2016 and conclusion date of 9/30/2016. This blueprint is contained in the smart blueprint “Chocolate Bars”.

In this case the smart blueprint name, Chocolate Bars could be sufficient for the scheduler to schedule a chocolate bar event with all of the production order requirements, and jobs contained inside the blueprint applicable for the target date.The blueprints within should be labeled depending on the ultimate goal and your process or desired process.

Simply put, blueprints are flexible, you can change an instance of a blueprint, or you can change the source blueprint in setup.If an audit trail or blueprint version is required then a blueprint must be created in Setup to capture the changes and create the audit trail.

For example, using the same Chocolate Bars blueprint specs. Suppose one of the chocolate machine breaks, you have several chocolate mixers out sick, and your cocoa supplier is late due to a storm and backlog in a different country. As a result the blueprint for this production order gets nudged 3 days forward and you will need more people to work through the backlog; nothing else changes, and after this surge production will return to normal levels.

In this case the change should be applied on the Planning board, but if this change affects too many events, consider the blueprint source in the setup blueprints area, outweigh the cost benefit and effort of each, the point here is that you have options.