I manage an agricultural production facility where each item in the process is the same every time. I have set the board up with groups for each cycle of the process and items being the actions of the process:
Example:
Group: Cycle 1
Item 1: Harvest
Item 2: Dry
Item 3: Trim
Etc.
The harvest date is variable (I will set this manually) but each item in the process takes the same number of days per cycle (ie. Harvest = 1 day, Dry = 7 days, Trim = 3 days) and each succeeding item is dependent on the completion of the previous item.
Is it possible to automatically set completion dates based on number of days, where I would just fill in the Harvest date and Monday would fill in the rest of the completion dates based on dependencies? I would love to just be able to manually have the start date input and not have to manually put in the rest of the completion dates.
@puffenjs this is certainly possible. if you set up a timeline and a dependency column on your board, then you can select each items dependency and put the duration of each item in the timeline column. e.g. 1 day, 7 days, 3 days etc…
If you have multiple harvests a year, I would suggest creating this board as the template, and then for each harvest creating a new board from the template, set the harvest date and watch all the other dates magically fall in line.
Thank you for the answer! I tried this previously and the only thing that I cannot figure out is how to set the number of days on the timeline column. It only allows me to select the start date and end date manually instead of selecting a number of days and having it auto-populate based on the completion of the dependency item. I must be missing something.
ah, yes, I follow. The way we have gotten this to work is by creating the first harvest based on fictitious or arbitrary start date. for example:
[item → timeline → dependent on]
Harvest → Jan 1 2021 → " "
Dry → Jan 2 - Jan 8 2021 → “Harvest”
Trim → Jan 9 - Jan 11 2021 → “Dry”
so on…
Set this timeline up in a template board 1 time, and then anytime a new harvest starts. Copy the template board and just update the Harvest start day and it’ll all work from there.
That is the simplest way I’ve found to do this kind of dependency. I understand what you are saying now about literally putting in number of days, and while this could be possible I don’t think the automations are set up that way. It may be possible with some custom automations and trying to use a ‘day length’ column to set date to Today + n days, but I believe using dependencies with a template board is simpler.