A printing press is moved through several assembly areas during production. A particular production step, which itself comprises numerous tasks, is carried out in every area. For example, the printing mechanism is assembled in Area 3 and this requires 100 tasks.

A decisive factor for you, in deciding to use a work center operation set, is the following situation: The team that assembles the printing mechanism consists of highly qualified employees, who autonomously decide when and in what order the material components are fitted. The individual tasks that are carried out in the assembly of a printing mechanism should therefore not be planned by the system.

You enter each task that is carried out as an operation of the Assemble printing mechanism reference operation set. You enter standard values for all operations and assign material components. In the Assemble printing press routing, which describes the whole production process for a printing press, you create a reference to the Assemble printing mechanism reference operation set as the Assemble printing mechanism work center operation set. You assign the work center operation set to the work center Area 3.

Now if, for example, the component Screw M42 is required in the reference operation set for operations 100, 200 and 400, in quantities of 10, 50 and 40 pieces respectively, then during material requirements planning, the system simply records that the work center operation set requires a total of 100 pieces of Screw M42. The scheduling process similarly, records only the standard values in a work center operation set. In other words it takes only the sum of the standard values for the operations in a reference operation set. The system therefore records, for example, that 10 hours are required to assemble the printing mechanism. On the other hand, the system ignores the fact that, of these 10 hours, 30 minutes are allotted to operation 800.