The are a couple of enhanments that I would like to see for MRP with New PO Suggestion.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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:
Deadlock
Lock Wait
Exceptions
Error Copying BOM
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.
