MRP suggestion of sub-assembly part

Hello everyone! This is my first post, I’m new to Vantage, please excuse any incorrect terminology.

We have an issue on setting up sub-assembly part, which is purchased, invoiced, but we don’t ship it physically. It gets consumed by another part.

Reason behind it is that customer wants us to hold certain amount of stock of part in non-painted state. When they are ready to order a specific colour (top level part) we raise another demand. We have another part for that which has a paint operation and the part in question as material.

The problem we are having is when raising demand for the painted top level part, if also the non-painted part isn’t finished and booked to stock, the MRP will suggest to make more non-painted parts.

I’m not sure how to tackle this problem. Few questions arise.

  1. Would disabling “process MRP” on non-painted part solve the problem?
  2. How can we sell or invoice non-painted part, but not ship at the same time, so it stays in stock until ready to be consumed by top level part?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Let me understand this before I go any further.

  • The subassembly component is a machined complete part which is unpainted. You do nothing to it (except maybe inspect it when it arrives), so no value is added.
  • Once this machined complete part is received (purchased),
  • you invoice the customer for the component part and
  • hold it in stock until you get an order for the painted final assembly.

Do I understand this correctly?

Charlie Smith

CRS Consulting Svcs

(860) 919-1708

CTCharlie@outlook.com

Hi Charlie,

That’s all correct but the first point. I’m sorry, I haven’t explained it very clearly. We also make the non-painted part, it’s not a purchased part. The non-painted part has it’s own set of operations, quite a few actually.

Do you invoice for the complete part as if it was painted and just ship it after you paint, or does the painted part have another invoice?

Hi Josh,

The painted part has another invoice in our case. It is another part number.

Your method is specifying that the lower level item has to be made with the parent job. Break that link in the methods, and you can create demand for the painted and unpainted part number separately.

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OK, SO you build the subassembly unpainted and put it in stock. This would make it a stand-alone component and would be used as a material in your parent assembly (like @Gil-V said). In that instance don’t mark the the component as a “Pull As Assembly”. Doing this will consider the subassembly a material component. You can also set a minimum qty to keep in stock so that the MRP can maintain that level. Make the component part a “STOCK” part to maintain inventory using MRP.

Once the demand is created for the Parent Level part, the demand for the lower level “unpainted assembly” will be updated and MRP will accordingly.

As for the invoicing and costing, You are billing the customer as you create the unpainted assemblies I believe you said. This reduces the part cost to $0 as they are already paid for. The best thing you can do is lot track the part.

Create a Sales Order for the unpainted component in the quantity you want to make. This will create another demand for the assembly. Once made, create a packing slip and ship it to yourself using the lot number. This will take that lot out of stock. Then invoice it. Once shipped, the Sales Order demand is satisfied. DO NOT Create the SO until it’s time to invoice because the SO and the parent will create double demand and screw with the inventory demand.

Putting the item back into stock for usage basically is 2 steps. Step 1 is to do a cost adjustment of that invoiced lot to $0. DO NOT have inventory of that lot when you do that. Otherwise you will create a cost adjustment that affects your GL. Follow it up with a quantity adjustment of that lot back into stock. The Qty adjustment should put that lot into stock at $0 cost value.

Now when that lot is issued to the parent level job for painting, The lot selected should go into the job at $0.

It’s a bit of work, but it should keep track of costs and allow you to bill the customer.

That is all I can think of off the top of my head.

Hi Gil, thank you for your reply. We’ve done something like this in the past. We’re created an additional part, which we used to transfer the other stock to, just so that the link doesn’t exist. It worked, but it meant we had extra set of parts on. I see this as workaround and will get to this solution if nothing else can be done.

Hi Charlie, this is what we have at the moment, the unpainted sub-assembly is “stocked”. The problem only comes up if we put on demand for the painted part before the unpainted part gets booked into stock, which is what actually happened, when we realised we’re not doing it right.

Somehow I would like to be able to manually raise job cards for unpainted parts, so that MRP would just ignore it. Anything to stop the double demand being raised, while the unpainted parts are still going through production.

The painted component gets invoiced too here, basically additional charge for painting.

At the back of my head I’m thinking, could we just ship the unpainted parts to ourselves, invoice the customer as normal, then update stock?

This is all getting a bit complex, apologies.

I agree with the last line.

Thank you every one for your input. Going forward we’ll just work around by having another part number which will have it’s stock adjusted from the unpainted part. That way, the link will be broken as suggested by Gil.