We recently stopped carrying inventory on “custom” customer parts (liquid/weight UOM). Parts are now buy to order; however a customer may order various part numbers that will consume this inventory.
These jobs generate PO suggestions for the product, however they EACH generate a suggestion for the part minimum qty, rather than suggesting that we order 1 unit of the minimum qty. The PO correctly tags the say 3 jobs with a single line and multiple releases, but each release is bumped up to the minimum qty as setup in part entry.
Is this intended behavior, a part setup issue, a “fix every release on every PO” type item or what?
As a follow up on this… since these are consumed components (not purchased line items) Buy to Order becomes irrelevant. However, non-stock (which drives the jobs to be purchase direct) does cause the demand to not be cumulative… wanting a min qty per job, rather than using the min qty to fulfill say 3 jobs worth of demand. Just a heads up for anyone in the future.
You can set minumums to 0 and so even though it’s a “stock” part, not have MRP/Suggestions try to buy any more than you need for the demand that’s in the system. Then if you want to merge those demands into a single PO, you set the “Days of supply” on the part. What that does is whenever a demand comes up for that part, looks an extra x number of days ahead to find any other demand and adds that to the demand.
For example, if I have a job with demand for a component that’s needed in 20 days, I will get a PO suggestion to the warehouse for a due date of 20 days from now. If I have a days of supply set to say 30 days, that demand will trigger the system to look 30 past the 20 days. So 20+30 is and demand between 20 and 50 days out, and it will suggest that you buy everything that you need in that window on a single PO.
It doesn’t suggest that you buy more than you need unless you have other factors set that would trigger that. Like minimum on hand, or safety stock, or some lot minimums.
If you have purchase direct, you will get multiple suggestions. However, if you generate the PO for those suggestions at the same time, from the same supplier, it should group those purchases on the same PO and same line with a different release for each job that is set to purchase direct.
Brandon, thats exactly what happens with purchase direct… however, each release triggers as the minimum qty for that part.
Example: 50 lbs of product is the min order, I need 35 to be consumed in one job and 15 for another (same delivery date) PO suggestions says “you need 50 for the 35 and another 50 for the 15”; it generates the PO for 100 lbs of product, with each release of 50. It’s on the same PO, but it’s ordering way more than needed, for an item we’d like to not stock.
So what if you don’t make it non-stock, but set the minimum on hand and safety stock to 0? That should group them, and not order extra (if you have enough demand to meet the minimum). Setting a large days of supply should gather more demand and help the issue.
However the goal of purchase direct on them was to purchase the product and 100% consume it on the jobs… order to job (for job costing) rather than order to inventory; as there will always be a little extra left over (that we want to “consume” and not keep on hand).
Purchasing it on the job means it never hits inventory; you get a true cost on the job (ordering smaller qty’s is more $$$, we’re standard cost) and it all gets consumed.
It seemed like a wide open fairway, but the qty’s would need to be adjusted on each PO release for the proper amount… not a clean solution.
Question though, if you don’t have enough demand to satisfy the minimum that you need to purchase, what do you want the system to do? If you don’t want to buy extra, the only option I see is to cancel or postpone the sales order. Currently, MRP isn’t going to move orders for you.
