We run MRP for that same part and get a suggestion to expedite and increase the existing line.
Is there any way to tell it to treat an existing transfer order as “un-changeable.” In other words, tell it that this transfer order line is locked and cannot be changed, suggest new instead?
How have others dealt with this issue?
Our production team is asking that we create new lines or orders if we are going to change a quantity. Is that bad practice?
We’re in the same boat with our fasteners. We have to book trucks in advance to ensure they’re available and for pricing so we have transfer orders set up in Epicor 2+ weeks ahead of time. Once a truck is set up, we’d rather not change it around and would rather just order a new truck. We also tend to have set days we pick up and deliver to make everything smoother. However, for those two weeks Epicor is suggesting changes to the transfers that don’t propagate to the source plants.
So we might have Part 123 produced in Plant 2 that needs to be transferred to Plant 3 to be used on 5/15. We have a truck going up on 5/10, so they go on that truck. MRP tells Plant 3 to cancel/reduce the original TO and creates a new transfer order suggestion for 5/15. The kicker is that Plant 2 DOESN’T see the reduce/cancel suggestion but DOES see the suggested new transfer as new (excess) demand, so we end up producing extra parts for demand that doesn’t really exist and that will disappear once the transfer order ships. This has bitten us in the behinds before with low-volume parts that we really don’t want to overproduce on.
I’ve looked into the transfer orders and they do have a Lock field and a Firm field, but it seems that MRP doesn’t respect those, nor are there any settings I’m aware of that prevent MRP from suggesting changes to transfer orders the same way you can do with Jobs and Purchase Orders.
Dang, I am trying to use transfer order suggestions instead of having our other warehouse do inventory every week and manually order… I am hoping we don’t run into too many gotcha’s like this.
I think if you don’t create your transfer order until the day of (or day before, if you’re willing to accept a few hours of weird suggestions) then you’re ok. But if you create your transfer orders in advance then that’s when you start running into problems.
You can see here we have 2 orders in our warehouse right now for product.
We have a firm transfer order open with 16 left on it due 5/5.
We have two in transit shipments of 16.
When I run mrp for this part it suggests to expedite the remaining 16 on the transfer order line, and then it says to create a new transfer order of 32 which puts us way over the maximum. How does this make any sense? Do I have some settings wrong?
