The company I work for went live with Epicor Kinetic on July 1st. We are having challenges with accurate requirement dates for our unfirm job suggestions.
The transition into the new system created a bit of a backlog and we expected some immediate fires that would need extinguishing. So, going live, we had a number of jobs due right away, as expected. The more days passed, and through confirmation within Time Phase, we realized the system was suggesting to replenish our shelves right away. We were making jobs for parts that seemed to be urgent but soon realized there was no demand for them. We were guided to set a Planning Fence up to give us some breathing room. We set it for 14 days. This has created a different challenge.
The challenge we have now is with trusting our unfirm job sugg. dates. We have jobs that we know are due today, tomorrow, etc but the system is honoring the time fence, kicking them out by two weeks. It is impossible in our environment, with a high volume of low quantity jobs, to do research in time phase to get accurate dates on a singular basis.
Has anyone had challenges similar to this? We are curious if there is a BAQ, BPM, customization, etc. that someone has built that, with a time fence in place, allows an exception to a job suggestion if the the part demand is required within the fence and provides a more accurate date.
What is driving the requirement dates on your unfirm job suggestions? Are they make-to-order sales orders, min on hand quantities, subassembly parts for upper-level parts?
Ignoring (for the moment) the physical possibility of actually doing what’s being requested, are those requirement dates accurate? Once the dust of the go-live settles, do you think this problem will lessen somewhat?
Messing with MRP is fraught with peril, so I would recommend looking at other solutions before trying to modify its output.
what you MAY be experiencing is a difference in how Kinetic handles SAFETY STOCK (vs how your old system did)… Epicor considers anything under your safety stock as an “EMERGENCY… RUSH” because you are under safety.
ALSO, there is a secondary setting that is called “Allow consumption of minimum”. If you have this set to TRUE, then Minimum is not considered an emergency as long as you have a replenishment order within the LEAD TIME of the part.
So, I would look at the safety, minimum, and the allow consumption flags for several of those parts to see how they are set, and determine if you should adjust the settings.
Thanks @Ernie ! Glad to be here. We have a spattering of demand sources…At the moment, they are all driven from orders.
We have stock parts, some of which have min/max levels set high and others that are “stock” but have zero in those fields. This is challenging in ‘job status maintenance’ because we cannot determine what is for the shelf vs. what is on demand. These can be a mix of top level assemblies and also sub assemblies. Side note, we have most of our sub-assemblies set to “plan-as-assembly.”
We also have parts that are in the database that are engineered but have different graphics (we are a printing company) that we have set to non-stock. We create jobs for these from the planning workbench.
Our sales team also creates parts on the fly, which we create jobs for out of the planning workbench.
Unfortunately, we are not confident that the problem will lessen. We’ve extinguished most of our fires in the backlog from our crossover to this new system. Open to any and all suggestions of areas to look into. Thanks for the response.
Safety stock is a new concept to us. This is not something we had set up in our previous system.
We will certainly look into and test safety stock, lead times, minimum and the allow consumption flags, as you’ve suggested. Your response is greatly appreciated!
There’s probably no “easy button” solution… these are the things we always discover once go-live happens and we’re at scale. It’s practically impossible to test for this sort of thing beforehand.
That said, it doesn’t SOUND like you’re getting BAD information, just not the RIGHT information. The way your MOMs are structured has a SIGNIFICANT impact on how your planners see things. The “Plan As Assembly” option makes it hard for them to see which subassembly-part jobs are related to a main assembly, but if that is the way your organization does things then maybe an (or some) additional dashboard(s) could be created that would give them this information.
Although hopeful, we were confident there would be no magic bullet for this challenge.
We have many subassembly parts that are used in an ever greater amount of top level parts. Others we will likely “pull-as.” We have “SUB” within our subassembly part IDs to help them stand out.
One behavior of new job suggestions that we find odd is the new suggestion for a part that already has a firm job in progress. We have the demand covered but if the due date on the job is beyond the req. date of the demand, we get a new suggestion. This makes it difficult to weed through the unfirm suggestions quickly. In a perfect world, we would like to solely get a suggestion to expedite the existing job in PWB.
Without more extensive experience, I am cautious to say yes.
We are looking for our unfirm job suggestions to have due dates that line up with sales order demand. If the demand type is to replenish our shelves, we would like to have a 2 week planning fence.
All of our equipment is on a finite schedule with a finite horizon of 15 days.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no out-of-the-box functionality in Epicor that can “divide” demand into two categories like that for scheduling purposes. To Epicor, demand is demand and it all needs to be fulfilled by its requirement date.
That said, what we need to do is (1) categorize which jobs get a planning fence and which don’t; and (2) figure out a way to have Epicor plan them separately.
Are you using the Make-To-Order functionality, so that the Job has a direct link to the sales order? I sure hope so… that will make this a LOT easier… and I’m going to assume that you are for the rest of my musings here.
All jobs with a MTO demand link do NOT get a planning time fence value.
All jobs with a Job-to-Job demand link (your Pull-As-Assembly parts) do NOT get a planning time fence value.
That leaves Make-To-Stock jobs… and here is where the dancing begins, because as I see it you have two different types of these. First are the “shelf replenishment” jobs, those get the 14 day fence.
Next are the
These are problematic, because if they are needed for a current sales order they should IGNORE the fence, if not they should HONOR the fence.
Is this a valid summation of the issue as you see it?