MRP/Scheduler and Alternate Methods

I have a subassembly that’s produced on two lines, one automated and one manual. Long story short, we want jobs configured for the most common material to prefer the automated line and overflow to the manual line, while jobs using other materials always run on the manual line.

For jobs using the common material, we don’t know when the job is quoted which line it will end up on. Modifying the MoM to use the operations and resources of the automated line would mean the configurator is making that decision rather than leaving it up to the scheduler.

Can the scheduler select an alternate MoM based on capacity? If so, and if the demand has configurator inputs associated with it, will the configurator for the alternate revision run on the job?

I’m thinking that different assembly lines, no matter how similar or different, should be represented as alternate revisions. That would also neatly solve the problem of operations on the same job being assigned to different lines.

John Kreger had a similar idea in 2012…