A manufacturing labor class is a grouping of labor resources with similar characteristics used in manufacturing for planning, scheduling and costing. A labor class is connected to routing operations with labor time and used to determine its cost and load. Separate labor class can be used for setup and runtime if those activities requires different skills, and/or has different cost.
The labor class is used to calculate and analyze labor load. The capacity calculation can be based on either:
The capacity is calculated using the Calculate Labor Capacity dialog. The result of the calculation can be viewed in the Capacity tab and is used to analyze the CRP and shop order labor availability.
When scheduling operations, capacity Requirements Planning (CRP) and shop order do not use the labor class or person resource to calculate start date/time and finish date/time. The labor load is calculated after the scheduling has been done based on the machine setup and run time.
Advanced Planning Board (APB) schedules operations using either the persons or the group capacity. Operations can be scheduled either finite or infinite depending on the settings in the Scheduling Capacity field.
The fixed labor rate and the labor overhead per cost set and period is entered in the Costs tab. This information is used to calculate the part cost. To calculate the actual cost for reported labor time the system can be configured in different ways to fetch the cost either from the labor class, the employee standard cost or salary information.