An Operator Calls In Sick: Covering a Certified Job the Same Morning

An operator absence is handled the same way as a machine breakdown: record it, reschedule, and read which work re-staffs and which slides. This walkthrough follows one Monday morning at Corbin Fabrication in EDGEBIC by User Solutions, where the shop's senior welder calls in sick with 34 hours of certified weld work on the week's plan. It is one of the worked examples we publish so the cover decision is visible rather than described.

Three of the four affected jobs cover themselves. The fourth teaches the lesson.

06:50, The Call

Ray Delgado, TIG certified, out Monday through Wednesday.

Corbin's weld cell is two machines on a day shift, 07:00 to 15:00. Two people hold the TIG-Weld certification: Ray and Nina Brooks, each rostered on the day shift Monday to Friday with 8 hours a day. The pool is normally 16 operator hours a day, and this week it is 8 for three days.

Four weld jobs are open, 34 hours in total.

Three of these will sort themselves out. One will not, and the reason is in the staffing column.

06:55, Record the Absence

Open the Daily Hours tab, Operators inner tab, select Ray, and open the Time Off sub-tab. Set the from and to dates and add the row.

Both dates are inclusive, so a Monday to Wednesday absence means Ray is back Thursday. Getting that boundary wrong by a day is the most common error on this screen and it puts a person back at work one shift before they actually are.

Type the reason. Six months from now, an absence row with no reason is noise; one that says "sick" is history.

Nothing has moved yet. Time off is master data, and master data never reschedules anything on its own. The procedure is in how to record operator time off.

07:05, Reschedule and Read What Happened

Rerun the four weld jobs. The result splits cleanly along the staffing column.

The three automatic jobs re-staff. The scheduler places skill-gated steps into windows where a qualified, rostered, present operator has hours left, and it takes whoever has the most free hours that day. With Ray out, that is Nina every time. Her 8 hours a day absorb J-5511 Monday, J-5512 Tuesday, and most of J-5513 Wednesday, with the last hour finishing Thursday morning. All three keep their due dates.

The pinned job does not. J-5510 is pinned to Ray, and a pin is hard by design. The step schedules only when that named person has hours, and the rest of the qualified pool is never used as a fallback. So J-5510 does not go to Nina on Monday while she is welding a job due Friday. It slides through the absence to Ray's first day back, Thursday, and takes 8 hours Thursday plus 1 hour Friday.

Its due date was Wednesday. The job lands two days late and appears on the Late Jobs report.

Nina, meanwhile, sat next to an idle machine on Monday afternoon that she was qualified to run.

07:20, Audit the Pin Before You Accept the Slip

This is the decision the morning turns on, and it takes five minutes.

The pin on J-5510 exists because a note on the order says the customer requires certified welding with sign-off. Nobody currently at Corbin knows whether that means Ray specifically or a qualification he happens to hold.

Call the customer's quality contact and ask exactly that. The answer: the requirement is for the customer's approved TIG qualification on file, which Nina holds and which was added to her record when she certified.

The pin was a habit, not a requirement. Somebody pinned it eighteen months ago because Ray always ran that customer's work, and nobody revisited it.

That distinction is worth being strict about. If the requirement had genuinely been Ray, the two day slip is the correct outcome and the schedule showing it is the feature working: a pin turns one person's absence into visible schedule movement instead of quietly handing regulated work to somebody who is not authorized to do it. The honest slip is the whole reason to use a pin. It is also the whole reason not to use one casually.

07:30, Clear the Pin and Rerun

Two routes, both one gesture.

Set the step's Operator field back to automatic staffing, which lets the scheduler use the whole qualified pool. Or lay the schedule view out by operator, where lanes become people plus an unassigned lane, and drag the bar onto the unassigned lane, which clears the pin the same way. Dragging it onto Nina's lane instead would pin it to her, which trades one rigid assignment for another and is not what you want here.

One property of the drag is worth knowing before you use it in anger: it checks qualification, not hours. A drop onto a person who does not hold the step's required skill is rejected with a reason naming the skill. A drop onto a qualified person who is already fully booked is accepted, the pin is written, and the next scheduling run books the hours honestly and slides the step. The drag records intent; the run tells the truth. The procedure is in how to reassign a job to a different operator.

Rerun the four jobs.

With the pin gone, J-5510 is the earliest due of the four, so it goes first: Nina welds 8 hours Monday and finishes the last hour Tuesday morning. The other three follow and all four complete by Thursday, when Ray is back and the pool doubles again.

07:45, Check What Ray Already Started

One thing does not move, and you should confirm it rather than assume it.

Ray started an operation Friday afternoon and logged 3 hours against it. A started operation keeps its work center, and completed hours are never moved or recomputed by any reschedule. That step stays exactly where it is, with its logged hours intact, and only its remaining hours are re-planned.

Check the job's operation rows: the actual start and the logged hours must read exactly what was recorded on Friday. Thirty seconds, and it is the check that turns "the system probably did the right thing" into knowing it did.

08:00, Verify the Crew Plan and Hand It Out

Two surfaces close the morning.

Open the Dispatch tab under Daily Hours for the week. It lists the plan grouped by operator and then by date, with the shift, job, work center, operation window, and hours, filtered by a date range and an operator picker. Nina's Monday now shows J-5510 for 8 hours. Ray's Monday to Wednesday is empty, which is what an absence should look like.

Then open the operator view of the Resource Calendar and confirm the TIG-Weld pool reads 8 available hours a day for the three days rather than 16. If it still shows 16, the time off dates are wrong or the reschedule did not include these jobs.

Print the dispatch list and hand it to the supervisor. Total elapsed from the phone call: about seventy minutes, most of it the phone call to the customer.

What This Walkthrough Proves

1. Automatic staffing covers absences on its own. Three of four jobs re-staffed with no human decision at all.
2. A pin never falls back to the pool. That is exactly right when the person is the requirement and expensive when they are not.
3. Audit your pins before you need them. One inherited pin cost two days on a customer order and a phone call cleared it.
4. Started work is untouchable. Ray's logged hours stayed exactly where he left them Friday.
5. Record the absence, then rerun. Time off entered but never rescheduled protects nothing.

For the structural version of this problem, where one certified person is a permanent constraint rather than a three day one, see adding a second operator to break a labor constraint. For what a pin is and when to use one, see how to set an operator pin.