Curious about your thoughts on this MRP idea

Kinetic ERP
,
7

I don’t have any votes left… but

I like the idea, it’s clearly not for every company, but a companies that have a pretty stable supply and sell could benefits from some sort of statistical analysis to help find where the bad parameters are so that they can fix them. We made something custom to look at sales orders to do some analysis and pop a warning for things outside of the norm do that people would take a second look to make sure that they don’t have a mistake.

8

OH… here is how MRP can generate a bad suggestion… (real world story)

  1. for years, you normally by around 100 per month on average
  2. someone does a big booboo in a BOM and accidently puts the wrong UOM on the BOM… instead of 1 each, they specify 5 gross per unit (1 gross * 5 = 720 each).
  3. Job gets created for the order
  4. MRP multiplies the job qty (2) by the qty per of 720, and creates a suggestion for 1440 each.
  5. 1440 is way outside of the normal buy, but the buyer doesn’t know that unless they REMEMBER, or do research (looking at historical buys).

THIS enhancement does that research, and would flag this buy as outside of the norm. If they had simply purchased it, they would have purchased 14 months worth instead of only one due to a mistake made by an engineer.

9

That happened to us to. Conversion from feet to inches. We bought 12 times as much structural beam as we needed.

2 Likes
10

I guess this is where I don’t agree. To me that situation isn’t MRP making a wrong suggestion. MRP did exactly what you told it to do. The BOM is just wrong.

I just think proper inventory control, proper engineering practices, proper control over part data, etc are they ways to stop you from buying or producing too much or not enough.

I get that this is a way to highlight errors in my data, but I think there are other, better ways to do that that already exist.

1 Like
11

MRP is just the culmination of ALL of the possible errors in your settings. Whether it be part settings, bom settings, or MRP run settings. So if anything is wrong anywhere, the symptom will show up there. You can either make a tool for every possible thing that could be wrong to fix it, (which eventually you could/should do) but the immediate/faster thing to do to see the symptoms would be something that looks at the result of all of the factors. Then you can work backwards from there.

3 Likes
12

I would like to see Epicor integrate a cahtgpt-like tool into MRP and other facets as well. Imagine if I could ask Epicor to explain a particular suggestion. The tool could ingest the logs and narrate back to me how the decision was made. I could tell it why I think the suggestion is wrong and it could tell me which parameter to change to get the desired results.

13

Have the AI generate a daily AI text-to-speech synthed podcast using the new AI voice models to make it sound legit. So your buyers can just listen to it on the way to work.

@timshuwy
We’d vote for the IDEA but unfortunately we are capped out on existing items already. ← stop it :unamused:#Moderator

14

And then it will insist it was correct and that you should reevaluate your life because they like to train these LLM’s on Reddit scrapings.

15

I know this was said in jest, but in reality, chatgpt specifically is amazing at this type of work. It is already quite adept at analyzing error messages and logs even without being trained specifically on epicor documentation. I can only imagine what would be possible with domain specific training.

16

Sure, there’s promise. Just wake me up when it’s not sending my data to a cloud for processing or (at minimum) that prompt injection is no longer a thing. If someone instructed the chatbot to pretend it was a magical wizard that liked to tell everyone what all the sales people made last month, I’d get sucked into a tedious meeting within 24 hours.

17

whatever you decide to do please don’t make MRP slower

18

Yes this is a good point - I think something like would be another level of logging selection - right now you can pick Basic or MRP for example. This could be like learning mode or something and I’m sure it would add time.

19

One Word: “ITAR”… ChatGPT is not ITAR compliant, and probably is not “corporate secret compliant”… we do want to integrate some form of AI in decision making, but ChatGPT is still at its infancy to know where it is going.

20

My thoughts would be that this analysis would be an optional “after” process when MRP is complete.

1 Like
21

The are a couple of enhanments that I would like to see for MRP with New PO Suggestion.

  1. If there are multiple suppliers for a part, suggest the supplier with the best price (taking into account supplier quantity price breaks and not just showing the supplier most recently purchased from) have a column to show if there are more than 1 approved supplier.
  2. If there are supplier quantity price breaks, show how many more units should be purchased to get to the next break point and what that discount equals.
  3. When alternate parts exists, include that inventory when calculating on hand to determine if the total inventory levels (of all comparable alternate parts summed together) are below the min on hand or not.
22

Microsoft is doing it . . .Microsoft brings an AI-powered Copilot to its business app suite | TechCrunch

23

Oh man, yes. About 12 times in the last month I have nearly gone about to make an Excel macro to parse out the 96.4 MB of log files that get generated every MRP run. (Yes they overwrite. That’s just last night’s tally.)

Opening 7 files (one per process) and doing Ctrl-F, Ctrl+V on each is just silly. Then comes the sifting of dozens of lines per part.

I have one of those, specific to our main product line. I check it every day. And yet this past weekend someone left a BOM checked out over the weekend. :space_invader: :space_invader: :space_invader: This time it was still checked out when I went to see what happened. But other times the problem was fixed already, but I’d still like to know what did happen at the time.

24

It’s already included in the Observability part of the DevOps idea. :person_shrugging:

1 Like
25

Today I did it.

I can’t attach macro workbooks, so here is the text file. I attached the workbook, also, but it’s just an empty shell.

There’s nothing sensitive in this, but like the “BOM copy times” sheet will be useless for you as is. I have it set to look at only our model numbers. You could easily edit it, though.

MRP log aggregator v1.xlsx (11.0 KB)
MRPmacro.txt (8.7 KB)

26

We archive our log files every morning and clear archive folders older than 1 week. That way I only have 1 days’ worth of logs to review. Notepad++ is free and an awesome tool.

What we do is old school for analyzing logs - but much better than looking at individual log files.
I highlight all our log files for the day in question, edit with Notepad++, then do a Ctrl-F and click the “Find All in All Opened Documents” button. The results show in the bottom window and I can copy/paste those results as needed.

My standard searches:

  1. Deadlock
  2. Lock Wait
  3. Exceptions
  4. Error Copying BOM
  5. No resources

I have been digging into MRP log files for several years now. I do have to say they are much improved as of Kinetic. There is even a summary at the end of the file that is easier to parse and will give you how long each processor took for every level - with total parts and jobs.

We also saw an MRP Status dashboard in one of the extended education sessions on MRP troubleshooting. The dashboard actually shows which parts each processor is working on - way more info than Active Tasks > Details. “Safe harbor” but it might be included in standard Epicor at some point in the future.

Jenn