My goal is to combine the Receiving and Issuing Material steps into one. Currently we have our receiving department receive each PO line as they come in, then issue each to its specific job. This is extremely time consuming since they have to look at each PO or look for job demand to see where this material needs to be issued.
I know on the PO you can purchase lines specifically as “Job Materials” and when they are received they are directly issued, but due to short lead times our purchasing department purchases directly off of the sales order and at that time the job has not even been created yet.
My first thought was to create an embedded dashboard onto the receipt entry program that shows open job demand for purchased lines. Atleast they could make a faster determination, but it doesn’t simplify the process.
Does anyone have any better ideas? Open to simple and more complex customizations.
We use planning contracts to keep all of that straight. If you set you materials to back flush it will do the issueing when the operation is completed. Check out the thread below to see what it’s all about. It will take some process changes to make it work, but it’s a way of allocating stock to jobs before the jobs are built.
We do a lot of short-lead-time make-to-order, and we automate the Order Job Wizard so the jobs are created when the Sales Order is entered. As soon as the customer has an acknowledgement (also automated in our case) the Production department has a Job on their dashboards. I don’t see why you couldn’t then automate the next step too, if you wanted, and end up with a chain of events that includes the PO. That would save you having to do anything extra at the receipt stage at all.