The way you are doing this should work. If you make the 0 level manually, the next MRP run should suggest the jobs to be made to the 0 level. You will probably get a lot of noise until everything is in place. That is to say, you will get the suggestions for the orders until MRP sees that there will be a quantity in stock to meet the demand.
You should not have to change any settings to have this work. Since you are manually doing the “MRP” for the 0 level, everything should come out in the next MRP run. There will be noise, but once everyone learns what the noise is, it can be easily ignored.
We may need to split at any point. Top, or at lower levels. One reason we are trying to move to making all the sub-asms their own jobs was to allow splitting of the details if needed.
Well, you don’t need to split a level 0. You can just ship whatever you have and leave it open for the balance. Which is what you would be doing if you linked 3 releases to 1 level 0 job.
Yes, Ideally we never have to split that top level. However, if the need to split is there, we will split the top. This allows us to close out the job that we shipped, while the split job can remain open.
If the Job 0 is for 100 pieces, linked to 4 different releases at 25 pieces each. It doesn’t matter if you can only complete 55. Complete what you can. Ship the 55 (release 1, 2, and x5 from release 3).
Yes and No.
Part X (25 on hand)
Order A comes in for 15 of Part X. You allocate that materials for that order so it “removes them from stock”
that way if Order B comes in for 15 pieces of Part X, you can’t go in and “steal” the stock from Order A.
So, you are contradicting yourself. You say that you want to group releases together, but then you say you want to split the 0 level and close out jobs. If you want to group the level 0 together, you should never have to split the job because you are saying you want those manufactured together. If you plan on splitting them, you should not group them together.
Nate,
I think what you’re going for is this.
Make the SO releases NOT FIRM (this is how we operate). This will avoid MRP making “Make Direct” job to the SO, which allows you time to make the Job 0 manually. You can write a simple BPM to automatically uncheck firm.
Part A non-stock = 1.
Part B and C should be stock. Make all of your min/max etc = 0 so MRP won’t try to hold stock, but the parts should be Non-Stock = 0.
Uncheck Plan as Assembly. (I don’t use it and I think in your case it’s not necessary since you don’t want the parts made direct to Job 0)
Job 0 should have demand links to whatever SO releases it needs to be.
Doing this should make stock jobs for parts B and C. When they are complete you need to issue the parts to Job 0.
The due date for the stock jobs will be JobHead.StartDate for Job0.
I think this gives you everything you’re looking for. You’ll be able to issue only what you can make to Job 0. You’ll be able to ship only what you have and still be able to track what Jobs are for what releases on the SO, remaining quantities, etc.
If you need to shift gears and issue parts to Job1 (Q2) then you can do that also. MRP will adjust.
You’ll probably want to lock qty on the Part A/B MRP jobs. This way if you shift demand around it won’t make a suggestion to increase the current qty and instead make an entirely new MRP job. If you don’t allow historical dates then DO NOT LOCK THE DATE.
I’m not really clear on what you are trying to accomplish but I do have some comments that I hope will help.
Days of Supply is perfect for demand out in the future when you don’t want to make more than the demand entered and the qty varies from period to period. We use it to keep our quantities at a level that makes sense to keep setup/changeover times at a minimum.
A job cannot have one demand link direct to a Job or Sales order AND have it go to stock at the same time. However, you can have multiple demand links on one job, for example 4 lines direct to Sales Order Releases and one demand link going to stock for the remaining qty.
As for the number of jobs, if you’re not going direct you can put a min lot size on the part you are making so MRP will create jobs with quantities no lower than that number. We use that setting because we know we are going to need more in the future but the demand isn’t all there yet.
Also, you can create jobs to stock to get the demand out there for materials and then modify them before they are received to stock by adding a demand link direct to a job/sales order and reduce the make to stock quantity.
A word of caution about using Min Lot Size - be careful using the min lot size when doing direct demand links. We’ve had issues in the past where MRP made the job direct to the Sales order the min lot size qty instead of the qty on the actual sales order line, causing us to have to review the demand for those items and adjust the demand link quantities accordingly. For example, a min lot size is 25 and a sales order release for 10 is entered. MRP created a job direct to the Sales order for 25 and we had to go into the job when we firmed it to change the qty on the demand link to 10, and add a make to stock link for 15. Not sure if it still does that or not, it’s been a hot minute since I’ve done demand links like this so maybe they have found a solution for that. Hope this helps!
We don’t know what we plan to split at the time we group them together. Some orders might get luck and sail through with never needing a split. The splits come down to how many parts a particular operation can finish at night and send on to the outside vendor. For us, splits always happen reactively when either the entire order cant be finished right away, or some part has to be finished right away and pushed ahead. If we knew well enough ahead, we wouldn’t split at all, we would just make the quantities we know we would need. We simply do not have that level of certainty.
I would like to have demand links, but if my demand SO releases do not have sufficient quantity to split off, then I can’t split the job (if needed). If all our customers placed their orders with a single release with the full quantity, then we could split all we wanted. Some of our customers do that. However, some customer order lots of small releases. Even though we end up shipping them as we can. In our current setup, a job might contain demand for 20 releases. The quantity and dates on those releases may change every week up until we actually start shipping the parts. As long as the job 0 has release demands, we can only split that job in quantities equal to or less than a single release quantity.
I don’t want to speak for @cpilinko , but I believe we are both thinking the same thing. If I am wrong @cpilinko , please let me know.
Why are you splitting jobs? You can just leave them open with a remaining balance, it sounds like the decision to split jobs is because “that’s the way you’ve always done it”. If you group 3 releases together on a job for 30 pieces and only complete and ship 10, are you leaving the job open for 20 and completing them later? If not, why?
Lets say we group 3 release of 10 pc each to a job. Most of the job runs along just fine. But on the last few ops, the customer forces us to deliver what we can. At this point it is up to the next operation to finish as many as possible to send out to the last outside vendor op. Lets say that last op is burr bench. They work all night but they can only finish 22 pieces. Now I have a job with 22 pieces ready to go, and they must go ahead, while the remaining 8 stay behind to be finished at a later date (or the original demand date).
We want to tell Epicor that we split this job, so that we can close out the first part of the job, and leave the split open until it is complete. Without telling Epicor we split that job, we have to wait until all split lots for the job are complete before we can close the main job. Does this make sense?
Your explanation makes sense, but the reasoning does not. Why can you not leave the job open for 8 pieces? Why do you have to close the job for 22? Again, this sounds like “that’s the way we’ve always done it” reasoning. You don’t have to do that, you choose to. Unless there is some requirement that I am not aware of that dictates you have to operate this way.
This is the biggest part that can really help get our schedule correct. Right now we have no visibility into our split jobs because we don’t split them in Epicor. Every split and the main job sit in a pile until all of the splits for that job are complete. Then, finance can officially close the job. This wreaks havoc on our costing and scheduling. Those 22 pieces might be all the customer needs right away, while those 8 pieces sit open on a split job for months until we have the push to complete them, or cancel them.
If we allow job splitting in Epicor, then we get to ship those 22 parts, and close that part of the job, while the other 8 parts remain on a split and show load against our resources, and it can be rescheduled out into the future to properly show that load.
