Any one know of a technical guide for PO Suggestions?
We are getting a lot of Expedite or Reduce messages that want us to move it only one week. What parameter on a Part would help control the Expedite/Reduce PO Suggestions messages?
thanks Kim
I’d think it would depend on the demand. Whether it is to satisfy Min/Safety Stock, Order Line, or Job Material.
Part->Sites->Planning:
Reschedule Out Delta: (postpone)
Reschedule In Delta: (expedite)
Planning Time Fence: “freeze” the next ?? days from anything being changed/rescheduled by MRP process.
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You can also lock down your qty or due date on your PO releases and it won’t create any new change message.
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This is a killer… we had 1000s of suggestions and sometimes they’d contradict each other. The buyers were second - guessing tbe system and fighting it constantly.
In the end I figured out that the whole system is something like this:
We chose a handful of high movers and tested dozens of scenarios. We also found there were hundreds of old jobs and releases to clean up, from csncelled and postponed orders.
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@Kimberley to actually answer your question, yes, there is a guide in Epicweb called MRP Technical Reference. We did find it worth studying, that is, we read it cover to cover and met twice weekly to discuss.
It was worthwhile because the flood of PO suggestions and buyers’ inability to trust the system caused a 40% increase in inventory.
I’d be happy to walk you through the visual model of what MRP seems to be doing if you ever want to get on a Zoom call.
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@SteveFossey Thanks I have read the MRP Tech manual it has just been awhile. I guess I need to read it again. I may take you up on that offer one day. 
I believe it does. Generating the PO Suggestions is a subset of MRP. I would play around with a part in question and see if the suggestions change.
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I can confirm they do. We had to play around with them.
We ended up creating a sort of test scenario in our TEST environment, with DMTs to enter orders (Sales Order Combined) using specific products, Filtered MRP, DMTs to place POs, etc.
This way I could list out all the settings affecting one part (the hierarchy of settings is in the top-right corner of my sketch above) and test one variable, run a standardized test scenario, and see the results in Time Phase. We got it so I was running a test every 5-10 minutes with a buyer analyzing the results and proposing the next variable to test.
We ended up finding results from everything shown on that diagram, plus the hundreds of stale items causing noise.
The good news is, in the end we tamed the beast and it’s pretty reliable now.
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@SteveFossey When you say stale items. Are those the cancelled SOs and POs? How did you identify them to be the issues. I guess I am wondering did you just look for really OLD open ones or did they have a flag but never processed to closed or voided? What about stale Jobs that needed Purchase parts; was that causing you issues?
Thanks for letting me pick your brain. I know it is a data issue just trying to track it down.
Kim
Basically once I noticed a time phase item for an old job I traced it to a cancelled SO and started doing queries. I found a lot of items such as orders cut over from our old system, orders postponed, POs that were never received but then superseded (in the Buyers’ minds) by new POs, and forgotten about. Old jobs that were open. Parts we made using Quick Job entry even though there were linked jobs in the system. On and On.
It was basically divide and conquer. Take one anomaly in Time Phase and use a query to figure out how many more like it there are, and eliminate them. It was honestly a nightmare but we went from the buyers blaming Epicor (and in several cases, quitting) to the buyers being engaged in figuring out how to make it work.
No worries at all - I am a beginner here and everyone has been propping me up. Very rarely able to actually help somebody else!
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