Hi,
I am curious about setup groups, ive seen that they can be used to group operations together.
can they be used to group parts together of the same raw materials?
cheers
Hi, I see this is an old post, but hoping youâve gotten some answers to this elsewhere? Weâve been asking this question with production planning also.
Yes, you can use Setup Groups to group raw materials together. Enter the value when you create the MOM.
@jkane to be clear - are you saying you create setup groups based on raw materials? The OPâs question was to group based on raw materials entering the operation. the Operations in the MOM allow for a single group entry, but not variable. Am I missing something?
I read it as they were aware that they could be used for operations (not that they were actually using them) and was wondering if they could be used for materials. So, I was answering with that assumption.
I may have read it wrong though.
So @sstuard - what exactly did you mean?
I was curious if they could be used for raw materials. To be honest, itâs our understanding that they can be used for operations, but we are struggling with how they actually function. We have a number of parts that have setup groups, but MRP or global scheduling doesnât seem to group these parts together. We just went live in May and weâre still getting our arms around this functionality.
My understanding is that it is a manual field. That is, you can use it to group operations together, but the system will not do it automatically. I could be wrong though.
If you are using the field, I would work at least a day ahead and use the field to find all operations for Monday and batch them all together.
We have the same need as you - material batching. Actually, itâs material and a particular finished goods specification (like color). The Setup groups donât do it for us either. And if you really get into it, the process is that Kinetic will create a new job for the combined group of jobs and distribute material and labor trans so you lose some specific accuracy - like if one job is for 100 but the other job is for 1000⌠not sure how that all works but it looks like it will not do it for use either.
Thanks for the reply, makes sense now why it wasnât working automatically!
So what did you come up with then Mike so that they schedule together? Is there an idea out there for this? We have this need too.
technically nothing yet. My CFG person is determining if there is an algorithm that will make the right âgroupingsâ for us, but then we need to decide how to implement. We are thinking about driving the setup group based on a CFG value, via a BPM when the job is released. And as an alternative, we are looking at capabilities equal to the material or mfg spec to be used by the BPM as well.
Part of our issue is that we may have a dozen jobs that could be grouped, but should they? What are the due dates for example. One might be this week, 5 next week, and so on - do we want to make that much WIP? Do we have enough material on hand? When does more material show up?
Honestly weâre leaning towards a post-Scheduler function that aligns our jobs for â>1 shift durationâ ( the thing @jkane and I have been discussing) AND grouping/batching. We have psuedo-code for both, but nothing concrete yet. But itâs looking like a metal-forming vertical front-end for Kinetic, like we did for the Lumber Mill I was at for my last gig.
To distribute material and labor you have to adjust the cost factors. The Epicor default sets all of them to 1 so it just gives them all an even split. It can be between 1 and 999. In a previous life I had written a calculation for these values based on the original parts.
Weâd have to do the same somehow. Our hesitation is that itâs so dynamic in our environment. Material, Labor, operations (not always the same for each product in the product family), Qty, Due Date (can we store the WIP if we batch these jobs?).
Dynamic makes it hard to automate/group for sure.