Ability to disable change suggestions for jobs and purchase orders

Feature Requests and Suggestions
1

All of our buyers hate PO change suggestions, and our production coordinator similarly hates job change suggestions.

I made a BPM to lock job quantity and date (as many of you also have, I believe) and I’m about to enact a similar one for PO release. This should, I think, only give suggestions for new jobs and POs, and if we go over our max OH settings for a part, so be it.

But I think overall, this should be a couple simple flags on, say, Site Configuration, and I think they should default to "Disable change suggestions - only allow new or cancel."

And cancel suggestions right now are tricky with the locking BPMs - I’ll need to make a dashboard to monitor jobs or POs with no corresponding demand.

One of the reasons that I am so adamant about locking jobs by default is a wonderful little feature, which I had described on that other site, but I’ll paste the body below:

[April 22, 2019]

I discovered last week what I think is a pretty major flaw in the way that MRP does math. I just finished a ticket with Epicor support on this, and he (Phil) agreed with the flaw and will put in an enhancement request, but he doesn't see it being as devastating as I do.

The problem is that PO suggestions or job suggestions can be wildly inaccurate BY DESIGN. And this is not an obscure case.

Specifically, the problem is with stocked components of manufactured parts.

In a nutshell,
* Demand for stocked component parts is based on quantities of firm and unfirm jobs, but NOT on the change suggestions.
* But supply for the parents of those components INCLUDES the change suggestions (and firm and unfirm jobs)
* When the change suggestions are all "Reduce Job" suggestions on the parent parts, the system suggests you buy or make many more components than you need
* Conversely, when the suggestions are all "Increase Job" suggestions, there is not enough demand for the components
* The point is, the change suggestions are not only advice; the unfirm jobs are BASED on the change suggestions. So factoring in only the jobs and not the suggestions results in inaccurate quantities.

Here is a test scenario:
1. Setup
* Create a part, MRP-01, manufactured
* Create another part, MRP-02. I made it purchased; it's irrelevant.
* MRP-01 has a revision and a method. The only material is 1 EA of MRP-02
2. Supply and demand
* Sales order for MRP-01 with 65 releases of one each, each a different day (spanning three months)
* Three jobs to make MRP-01 in quantities of 25, 20 and 20, each a week apart
* Run MRP
3. Results
* Total supply quantity of MRP-01 with suggestions: 65
* Total supply quantity of MRP-01 without suggestions: 127
* Total supply quantity of MRP-02 with suggestions: 127
* Total supply quantity of MRP-02 without suggestions: 127
4. Conclusion
* I honestly need to make 65 of MRP-01 and to buy 65 of MRP-02
* System tells me to make 65 of MRP-01 (good) and buy 127 of MRP-02 (bad)

Incidentally, the MRP flaw did become “problem” PRB0212213 on EpicCare.

2

I’ve also heard grumbling about change suggestions.
To this point have only played around with Reschedule In/Out deltas to try reducing some suggestions but… would be nice to have a flag.

Now that I think about it, I’ve never really spoken with anyone who actually uses change suggestions.
Might be interesting to hear from users who do, what they like about them… or don’t.

3

I do not believe our buyers ever look at that screen.

4

Cross-post. Turns out locking may not solve my problems either. Support agrees there’s a bug in that.