We would like to over allocate paper / film using the fulfilment workbench unfortunately the system is not letting us.
For example a job created by the mrp requires 15,000 Meters of paper, the paper in question comes in 9,000 Meter lot controlled reels therefore we would need to use 2 reels.
Allocating the exact amount runs the risk of another job thinking there is 3,000 meters available for immediate use when in reality that paper may not be available until the other job finishes and only provided we didn’t have problems with the first job and say use 16,500 meters of paper
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I can believe we are the only company that has this issue, how do other people handle this?
Note: I reported to Epicor back at the beginning of December and we were told this issue was fixed in e10, well it’s not and now we are being told it’s working as intended and we would need an enhancement request to get it changed.
Have you thought of creating two jobs. One for the production run and another as a “rework” job (the assembly is the same as the material). You would issue the primary amount to the first job and the balance of the roll to the second job. Now the balance would look like supply and you can control the date that it’s available. If you have an overrun on the first job, you could steal the material from the second job. Once the first job is done, issue the remaining material back to stock and issue to the next job.
Whilst you can’t over allocate using Fulfillment workbench, you can over-pick and over-issue at the point of issuing material to job. We have a similar scenario with catchweight. We fill liquid products into a pallecon (cube shaped metal shipping container), and the customer pays for the exact weight. The order always has 1000kg, as we may not have even produced the item at the point the customer orders. When we allocate, we allocate at 1000kg, but then on handheld material queue you overwrite the Qty with actual. I’ve written BPMs to ensure that when picking we don’t only “pick” 1000kg out of a higher amount, because it’s not possible to take part of the qty out of the box. Without the BPM, we had a couple of instances of undercharging customers and leaving few kgs in stock that needed to be written off.
Beware Incoming wall of text
The reason we would like to allocate materials is down to the process we want to use, materials are allocated by the stores and are then passed to production as required by the operators of the machines.
The reason for this is the reels of paper & film we use are very large, if we were making a million bags that would require 25 – 30 reels of paper (think container truck full) and take up a month of production time, this could not physically fit into the production area, in fact most of it isn’t even on the premises when we start a job. Secondly this paper can be used by a number of jobs, allocating will allow our operators to scan the reel they are about to use to ensure it’s the correct one for the job (they are all lot controlled).
Our MES screens have been changed to show the lot number of the reels allocated to the jobs, and the machines have recording devices to measure how much paper / film was actually used from the reel rather than the quantity the mill said was on the reel. Issuing of material is done via service connect when the operator presses the “Reel change” or “Job Complete” button on the MES so we only issue what was actually used.
