We are trying to set up Process MRP to forward schedule and not having any success. This is frustrating because it was working and we did a database wipe in preparation for go-live and now all jobs are backwards scheduling. In Site Maintenance>Planning we have the Scheduling Direction set to Forward and Minimize WIP is unchecked. In Scheduling Priority Code Maintenance Schedule Backwards is unchecked for all Scheduling Codes. In Process MRP Cutoff Date is Dynamic → End of Month +3 and Schedule Start Date is Dynamic → Today. Allow Historical Dates is checked. All operations are configured as Finish to Start.
Can you define what success would look like for you? You have not provided any examples of what you want to happen and what is actually happening which makes it hard for us to try and troubleshoot.
Success is having jobs scheduled to start today or as soon as possible. For example, if I have a sales order that needs to ship on 2/24 and takes 12 hours to process through the shopfloor and the sales order is released today I would like the job to be scheduled to start as soon as possible - likely tomorrow (the plan is to run Process MRP overnight). Currently when we run MRP the job is scheduled to start on 2/23 and finish on 2/24. We want to use forward scheduling for flexibility in handling rush orders and prioritizing resources as we are running infinite capacity to start. For context, everything we make is custom and the dates we have to have product in client’s hands is often critical - delivering early is typically OK, delivering late is not acceptable.
Yes. I have also struggled with this and have not been able to get it to work consistently the way I want to.
That being said, I think I know how to make it work but have not has a chance to test it yet. This is one of the things that has been bouncing around my head for a long time and just recently clicked. Where I currently am we are not using MRP, so I cannot test.
Basically, when a job is released and the schedule job comes up, I think you need to select Forward scheduling and set the start date to today. I am thinking that that will lock the job start date to what you set and will look to that for forward scheduling. The problem with Forward scheduling in Epicor is that if it does not have a start date to go off of, it calculates the estimated time, subtracts that from the due date, and then forward schedules.
If that does not work, you could always set every job priority to the highest which also forces the system to forward schedule from today.
First off, MRP is not a scheduler. Its demand management tool that creates jobs to satisfy demand from orders or other jobs. It will drop jobs somewhere in the schedule, but it’s generally bad at that.
Global Scheduling is your mass scheduling system, and would be run after MRP creates everything. To use this properly, you’ll need to use Scheduling Priority codes. There is an option within scheduling codes to disable backwards scheduling on a per-code basis. That will forward schedule jobs coded as such.
We forward schedule hot jobs and backward schedule everything else. It works well enough for us. I’m not 100% sure how it would handle a full slate of forward scheduled jobs, but I assume it would sort them by req date and priority factor.
If you’re backlogged beyond a order due date, you’ll get angry notices from MRP. You can shuffle priorities to move the job up, or push the order date out. You know, normal biz decisions.
Why do you have allow historical dates true? I never understood that. You can’t start a job in the past, you can’t receive a PO in the past. Allowing historical dates completely removes the schedule from reality.
As it was explained to me, it can be used for flagging expedites and where overtime may be required to meet a critical due date for a job. During testing, we turned it on to identify purchased materials/services that needed to be expedited.
Thank you. This is the approach we are testing now. MRP to create the jobs/PO suggestions → Calculate Global Scheduling Order → Global Scheduling → Generate PO Suggestions. It seems we were losing some PO suggestions so we are running Generate PO suggestions at the end.