Listing Material Shortages in an MTS / MTO Hybrid Environment

I’m trying to assist scheduling in looking for a practical way to identify material shortages in Epicor.

Historically we were a MTS shop. Since being acquired, management wants to move toward MTO with job batching. We do not have Advanced Planning & Scheduling.

Currently:

  • Most jobs are still created as MTS
  • Purchase orders are to stock, not to jobs
  • SKUs share common components
  • Because materials are not job linked, our scheduler has very limited visibility into true shortages
  • Once on-hand inventory is exhausted, we haven’t found a fast way to see which jobs are now short

What we’re trying to achieve:

  • A list of material shortages tied to:
  • Jobs or top-level parts
  • Aggregated demand across batched jobs
  • Comparison of Qty Remaining vs Available Qty
  1. How are others handling material shortage visibility in an MTS/MTO hybrid model.
  2. Are there recommended reports, dashboards, or BAQs that can reliably show shortages when purchasing to stock?
  3. Is manual allocation, job linking, or a partial MTO approach the only viable option?
  4. Any lessons learned when transitioning from MTS to MTO with job batching in Epicor?
  5. Would APS solve some of these issues?

You can run Multi Level Pegging and Epicor will peg supply to demand even in a MTS environment.

Epicor uses this data in DBs like Projected Sales Order Shortages to inform of potential supply issues.

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Yep, multi-level pegging has all the good info. You would enable that to run when MRP runs, and then maybe at particular times during the day.

The Multi-level Pegging Display app is very clunky and weak. So you will want to write BAQs for reports based on the MLP data.

The 3 pegging tables link together in this manner:

The Link table in the middle allows for many-to-many connections between demand and supply.

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After MRP finishes processing, run the Production Planning Process… which populates the Production Planner Workbench. That will show you which jobs have material shortages. Typically I set the Production Planner Process to run on a schedule every night after completes.

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