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well okay my name is Andy Emerson I can see a few people who are logged in who I dunno so welcome to you but also welcome to OBS who hasn't previously spoken with me the purpose of this afternoon is quite short webinar is to talk about the linking witness and Excel hand is one of our series of beyond modeling webinars I don't have a great deal of time so I'm going to restrict myself to showing you two models and I'm gonna start with hopefully everyone can see there's a model called run witness 13 from Excel and this is the latest simple interface that we have through which we can set up multiple replications in Excel specify our run length a warmup time a number of replications and if we have witnessed 13 C or beyond and if we have a PC with multi-core capability then we can run multiple replications at the same time which can of course save a considerable amount of time traditionally if we take the clock back a few years we've been able to link to Excel for some time our usually running it from witness the model that is visible here is accessible off the lunar portal so if you are a maintained customer you can get hold of it there is also a blog which I wrote a few weeks ago which talks about the simple experimentation using the method I'm going to talk through during part of today's session so you can get that by going to the lino website clicking on blog and you can download and you don't need to be a maintain customer to do that if we look at the witness model in front of us quite a simple model which has some date enough for our rewind it two times zero we can see all the variable arrays displayed on the screen go blank in the Excel spreadsheet I have a data sheet which has information that I wish to import directly into Excel and I will do this using the standard Excel read array command those of you familiar with witness will know there are a host of commands around about 30 commands to link witness to excel but generally we can get away with only using to the excel read array and the excel writer right in this case I have chosen to use named ranges which is a very useful feature in Excel because it doesn't mean I can cut and paste this set of data somewhere else within my excel worksheet and the named range we can see in the top here is preserved and therefore we can move data around without risking breaking any links so any of you who do use Excel links I would urge you or recommend you to consider using named ranges as a method of increasing the robustness of the communications between witness and Excel in this model I have five part types P 1 through P 5 which have a series of routes through the model you can see P 1 goes through the machines op 0 to 2 op 0 8 P 5 from 1 0 to 2 of 0 7 and I can add and change routing within Excel I have cycle times as well in a lookup table so all I need to do in witness is to out of the part index number and the next operation number in that parts of route through the model and it will pick up the cycle time accordingly if I go into witness and set the model running first of all I'm prompted for the model name they'll come back to that in just one moment and then it reads the information into the model and starts running it through and we can see the five different part types which are color-coded so I have none of your colorblind passed through the model in different combination different routines taking appropriate cycle times and what I'm recording in this case is a number of parts shipped which we can see in a variable tour the top right of the screen and I'm also looking at the maximum cueing that takes place in front of each of the operations as some simple reports that I wish to collect and write out to excel I'm going to translate into the fast-forward button to run the model through and when it gets the end of the time the reports are exported out to excel and if I just drag this window down a little bit we can see the number shipped in witness is matched by the number shipped in Excel and again if you check the numbers down the right-hand side of the column here you will see they correspond so I've taken our results at the end of the model run and exported it directly to excel okay so I've got a data in and I've taken data out if we take a look at the witness model those of you familiar the witness will know that the first thing that happens is the model enters initialize actions at time is 0 and in here I set up the initial conditions I could put it all into this one window but it's good practice to separate discrete pieces of code that have unique purposes out to make the model more maintainable so I'm calling two functions in turn if I go to the first function this is simply one that's it's the file name of the model if I am running this model from Excel the excel file name will be passed in automatically and therefore this piece of code will not be executed when running it from witness the initial value of the variable is zero and so then I can offer the default workbook name and then a message dialog opens which you would have seen when I first run the model which invites the user to change it if they wish it's by no means necessary necessary to do this but it does give you a little extra control after that I go into my initialize routine which is reading in the information from Excel the name of the workbook was preset in the previous function and now I'm specifying the name of the worksheet that I want to look at and then I use the Excel read array command this is a very simple command and I'll just I'll do in the next model I'll show you how you can create it from from scratch if you haven't got familiarity with it in this case I'm using the name of the worksheet the vs workbook and the vs worksheet as wildcards so that I can change my name my worksheet I can change then my workbook and the value will be automatically substituted therefore I do not need to change anywhere else so I can have multiple reading commands and a change in name the workbook will ripple through we can see here the named range I've chosen to use a data grid which are highlighted a few minutes ago so it goes into the workbook that we specified into the sheet that specified finds that named range and puts the value into the variable array the RCT matrix and it does the same for a few other sets of data it also sets the arrival time and then are in a standard set info command in order to derive those values into witness the reason we have to use asset info in this case is witness is configured to try and protect us from making changes that could be dangerous and trying to manually change or use a variable to set the first arrival time of a part is deemed to be dangerous a thing to do and therefore to protect us from our from ourselves that kind of functionality is disabled but there is a way around it as you can see if anybody wants to know more about that then if you put a chat message in and we will get back to you with some more information after this webinar but it's not part of the Excel webinar similarly I read in the Rena duration and the warmer period and we can see that from our control sheet the run duration again is a named range doesn't have to be but it's just neater than using explicit cell references which could be compromised the warmup time also is set up there and then I use a settings though again to drive the warm-up time into witness model and the result is a model then takes that data and runs forward on completion of the model run at the end of my run period I use an excel writer rate to export the reports and the information I'm putting out is things such as a number of parts to each of the scenarios okay let me close the witness model now and I shan't save it now returns to my excel and here we can see that our front-end which allows us to run replications in a simple way we have the name of the model specified we have our decisions of run length and where they're going to run our batch the number of replications we wish to do the number of cores we wish to use on our machine and the random number stream skip options said that we do put variability into our model we then have the run witness macro which if we look at it very quickly contains some fairly straightforward code to set up the model run and you can see information here such as a model name the number of replications of duration the random number stream skip etc in order to sat on water running but there aren't that many lines of code in order to fire witness open up the model we want and to run it for the requisite period of time so if I press the button witness will then start being processed and you can see a message comes up to say it's initialized the model scenarios started and if you look over to the left-hand side of the screen we will see versions of witness opening up so I click the scenario started button I'm going to switch to my reports mode so you can see reports appearing and we can see on here we now have multiple versions of witness being opened and run for two time I'm reports being bitten out in Excel so this does give us the ability to run models far more quickly than if we were just running one replication at a time okay this spreadsheet and model are available on the portal for those people who are maintained users and again if anybody wants a bit more information on it then we'll follow up outside of this webinar okay I'm going to move from this model now because time is running on and swept into a simpler model to show those of you who maybe are not so familiar with the witness excel links how we can enact them so I'm going to close my model and I will go to witness and I shall open up a model which is one that is based upon the training course that we're in our four-day basic training course and I shall go and open Excel as well and in fact I'm going to open an older version of Excel because that happens to be when I wrote this what the version was in so we can use any version of Excel 2003 2007 2012 I'm going to enter my just bear with me why navigated to her I want to get to my witness training 2013 are simple links and here is a spreadsheet in this spreadsheet I have some data to enter in which is cycle time mean time between failure and mean time to repair for a machine m3 which is the one that is colored the blue shade a one machine of quantity too so we can see in the elements left on left we have two m3 machines so what I need to do is to read this data in is to create a variable array if I can just get my Excel oops I need to create a verbal rate with this dating so here I've created a two-dimensional variable array two by three and if I look at my model initialize actions then we can see I have an Excel read array command if I was to make this from a starting point of little knowledge then my easy option is to go onto my variable array and actions uninitialized and there many parts in witness we have an Excel button which allows us to link into a workbook and as soon as I click on that I get a dialog box that which asks me to select the cells I want I select them and I click OK and we can see automatically that information is returned back into witness it gives us the full path name which we would need if the excel and the witness model were in different directories but for simplicity and portability I can quite easily delete that out so I have my excel read array which specifies a name of the workbook name of the worksheet and in this case the range that I have selected and then the variables going to place it then I can do a similar thing for other information as well so for instance I could create a shift now I drag a witness shift on to my model by default it is blank and I can go into my actions initialize and again select from my excel and I can move to shift sheet and select a shift pattern of my desire click OK and again we have this time an Excel read shift command entered into the model just a variation on the read array which has a syntax set and then if I were to restart my model and step forward and take a look at the result I can see my shift has been populated I can do exactly the same with a distribution so if I go to an intraday distribution place it on the screen by default it has no value go to actions initialize the Excel button select the sheet I want go to my distributions select my information okay weeks we create an excel at redistribution which again is just a variation on the excel read array command take that out click OK if I were to restart my model again I should find that my distribution has been populated and because this is done in initialize actions it means I can make changes on in my Excel spreadsheet to my data to my shifts to my distributions and each time I restart the model the new information will be brought in automatically so it is a very convenient way of bringing data into the model what I tend to do and most of us and the office tend to is that having created our Reid arrays using those Excel buttons which is probably the easiest way to do it I would then copy them or cut them from that location and bring them together in my initialize actions so I have one block of code where I do all my Excel manipulation in this case we can see we have an excel read array which is as initially set using those explicit cell references but I can quite easily change it because if I look in my Excel I've chosen to make this give us a named range with the name being m3 underscore times so I can quite simply substitute that in and I get exactly the same result I've also got a setting in here where I can change how many m4 machines I want the model currently has to just click and check there are two machines there and if I go into Excel and change that number to three and I restart my model and step it forward I can see I now have three machines in the model and if I go back into my initialized actions we can see that we use an Excel read array command in this case to read in a single value so it does not have to be a two-dimensional array a single value is sufficient I read that into a variable and then I use a set quantity command within witness to set the number of machines that I want so this means that as well as being able to read in as much data as I require from Excel I can also configure the physical layout I can add extra machines in and Jen change the quantity of machines and other elements and I can also change the capacity of birthers and I can change the quantity of labor and the shift patterns that are working all from outside of witness which is very valuable because it means that those of us who are writing models for customers to use can give a model to a customer who is not trained in witness and they can take it and use it simply by manipulating the Excel and then we get the results automatically exported back out at the end if I run this model for a little while which is about the last thing I need to do because we're now 20 minutes into the presentation I do have an export results and I'm just going to drag this across to the right hand side and if I set the model running what is happening is every time my machine to m2 is breaking down I can see that I am getting a breakdown being reported out I've done something on my model at some point where I have managed to break the m3 machine let me just change that rule to be a sequence next so hopefully I can run my model now and get a little more traffic going through my empty machine quite sure what I've managed to do to the m3 wasn't breaking down like that before but we can see every tower machine m2 breaks down it is writing the report out to witness and if I just stop it at this moment every time it is a break down if I go into actions on break down I am determining what the repair time is going to be from a distribution I'm recording that on a histogram and I'm also saving it as a dynamic variable in the model dynamic variables are very useful because they are self sizing which means we don't need to know how many records we're going to write when we before we run our model in actions on finish of my breakdown our actions end of my breakdown I'm increasing a counter number of breakdowns that have occurred and I'm using that to set my row number in Excel so I then write out to my workbook m3 data my sheet data out and I'm writing to column a and starts off as column a one then column a to column a three the V I this is my integer counter which is going one two three four as breakdowns occur I have to convert that into a string of text and concatenate it to get my address which is a way witness corresponds with Excel and I write out the repair at this time so this is writing out a repair whilst the model is running but I also have another stage that I have the model set to run to a defined end time I'll just check what that is is one week so if I run the model up to just ahead of one week and set it writing to stop the next thing is going to happen is this a weekly report is going to be generated and the weekly report is writing again with an Excel right array command this time to column C but rather than writing out individual results it is taking all the values in our dynamic variable and writing them out in one go so we need to specify the size of the dynamic variable which of course can be changing and I can use a maximum function in order to find out how big it is at the point I wish to write and the result then is if I click OK hunt step forward that it writes out the same set of information kapiten C and our dynamic variable in one go this tends to be our favored method of exporting data simply because it's quicker and because anytime that witness is write into Excel and if Excel is otherwise occupied there is a risk that communication may break down and you can lose a record if that happens you get a message from witness to say unable to write you lose that export but the model can't consuming quite happily but for us it's far safer to keep information in witness and write that at the end of the model run for that extra security and full speed ok I think I've pretty much run out of time I hope what I said it has been of some interest to folk so all I can say is thank of your attendance I hope it was useful if you do have any more information you'd like then send a message in and we'll deal with it off the line either later today or maybe tomorrow so ok thank you very much for that any say any questions please send them to chat not to not privately to me but to the main shut and we'll deal with it very promptly so thank of attention and I wish you a good day