How does everyone deal with shipping windows from Customers? The Product ready date is what MRP uses to drive supply and consume forecast but every week we have at least 5 shipments staged and ready to ship but the trucking company doesn’t pick up. If the order isn’t picked up in the same week it is due, the forecast for the following week is consumed by the now past due open sales order because our forecast window is 5 days before and 5 days after. We have a “do not ship before”, a “Cancel After”, and a “Need By” date, but the only one MRP looks at is the “Product Ready” date. Is there a different way we could handle this so the shipping window is considered before incorrectly consuming more forecast once the Product Ready date has passed?
I would rather not change the forecast window if I don’t have to, but I do recognize that changing the days before to zero might be our best option.
You could, for each customer have a UD field for number of delivery days. and when a sales order is created, the ship by is that many days before the need by as a simple fix to bring production forward
Or, if you have set days for collection per customer, you could display this info on the order and check that the ship by date selected falls on the appropriate day of the week.
sorry for the delay in responding! after some more digging, the pick lists for shipping show a Need by Date, a Don’t Ship Before date, and a Cancel After Date. The date that is driving MRP, and the one that Shipping uses to know when to schedule trucks, is the Don’t Ship Before date - this is also the same as the Product Ready/Ship by dates on the sales orders. What we need is to have MRP not consider the SO as past due when the Product Ready/Don’t Ship Before dates have past. Our biggest issue is the various ways Sales orders are entered. Some are EDI and some are manually entered. Some customers give several dates, some only give one date, and there can be any combination of dates from any given customer. I think our solution is to change the forecast window to 0 days before. I have done testing and it solves this issue, but I have to convince others that 0 days before won’t cause any other issues.