MRP on (sort of) configured parts

Kinetic ERP
1

Hey folks,

I’m trying to figure something out.

We have a part number for a steel billet that has a grade (chemistry) associated with it. And we roll these billets into coils that have further standard physical characteristics.

Billets are manufactured to a customer ID and are stored in lots by heat number. Customer ID and lot/heat can be associated.

Customers may have slightly different tolerances to grade variances, so that a batch of billets of the same part number made for one customer might not fit on another customer’s order.

Coils can be manufactured to stock, but will always be manufactured to some customer spec.

It acts as sort of a product configurator.

We want MRP to give us job/purchase order suggestions for billets based on coil open orders.

MRP can look at the billet requirements for an order and say, “no suggestion–you have plenty of these billets or you have plenty of these coils,” when in reality we do not have billets or coils in stock for this particular customer’s requirements.

Creating new part numbers for each variation would solve the MRP problem but would create new unpleasant issues.

Within these limits, does anyone here have suggestions on how MRP could be persuaded to know the difference in billets and coils manufactured to a different spec?

I’m wondering if there is something to be done at the PartLot level. I have a customer ID field on PartLot for other uses.
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Thanks,

Joe

2

I am interested in this as well. Whenever this type of problem comes up my mind immediately goes to ‘If its not the same thing it isn’t the same part #’…DUH

I have heard enough different people raise different versions of this issue to start to think maybe I’m the crazy one.

3

You might take a look at the PartDetail table and also the PartLot table.

Joining these to the OrderRelease and Customer tables, you could see the real demand based on these joins. MRP won’t create the jobs, but you could use JobManager to create the jobs.

You probably would want to turn off Process MRP on the PartPlant table for these parts.