How to align all the relevant tasks together.
If using the Close Gaps button and the tasks are moving to the plan creation date, this behaviour is by design to ensure that long-running operations that ‘started in the past’ don’t keep constantly rescheduling to start ‘right now’. When tasks are first created, their Earliest Start Date is set to the Planning Start Date. If, a few days later, then close gaps, the task has the same original earliest start date and it closes gaps to a date which is now ‘in the past’
To ensure the plan makes sense when replanning, use the Status Date. The Status Date tells Orchestrate what is the past and what is the future. It marks the end of the ‘Grey coloured, Historic’ region of the Gantt chart.
How to use the status date to ‘realign the plan’:
Ensure the status date reflects the point in time when you last updated the status of the plan – e.g. when the user last imported progress from another system, or ‘as at 8.30 this morning when all the previous shift’s bookings and paperwork had been processed’.
Select the tasks and choose Planning.
Select Align To Status Date.
This ensures that completed jobs are planned in the future but already completed are moved prior to the status date.
Non-completed jobs planned in the past but not yet completed are moved after the status date.
It also sets the Earliest Start Date of the task to a point where any remaining work on the job plans to the right of the status date.
For example: If the status date is 9 am, then for a 3-hour task to complete 3 items at a rate of 1 per hour, where 2 have been completed, Align to Status Date will set the ‘Earliest Start Date’ of the task to 7 am. This means when closing gaps, The ‘completed’ section will plan between 7 am and 9 am, and the remaining 1 hour of work will fall between 9 am and 10 am.
This behaviour works alongside and in addition to any other constraints affecting the task, such as predecessors, material requirements, resource capacity constraints etc.