question

The best way to have different Processing Times within the same station is a Global Table for a Processor. You will assign every item a Type label (number) and then put their respective processing times in the table as shown below.

Then in your Processors properties you can set the setup and processing time parameters to Using Global Table Lookup, and select the correct row as shown here.

There are 3 ways to have flow items skip processing stations. One is here, under the flow tab:

Where you send each item to their respective processor using port by case and the same Item Type label we mentioned before. If you don't have many cases where this happens, this could work. You will need to create A port connections between those processors and then the port by case will identify the item type and send it down that port number.

Another way to do this is to have the setup and process time in the global table for that particular processor and product be 0. In other words, if Product A does not need to be on Processor B, then that Product A's spot in Processor B's Global Table would be 0, like product type 17 in the first table. This will work if you don't have operators moving flow items between every processor.

The last way to do this would be in process flow. You will have to do almost all of your flow logic in Process Flow, with a decide before the move to every processor where the processor is skipped, and logic that moves it to its respective processor.

Please let us know if this makes sense and if you have any other questions!