Material Requirements Planning Module Improvements
DEAR Systems
The Material Requirements Planning module is aimed at addressing the needs of the production process. New production features will provide our current customers with powerful, logical manufacturing solutions to add to their inventory solution.
For more information, see Getting Started.
We would like to know your thoughts on how to further improve this module.
- DEAR Team
However, the material will show as available when a purchase order is placed for the outstanding item – regardless of the purchase order has been confirmed or not.
This creates problems with the scheduling process. Is there an adjustment you can do to keep the materials unavailable until it shows in the inventory?
There is an important use case requiring the current functionality which I want to highlight in case it gets removed due to dealing with this request.
(TLDR: I am really surprised that an PO which is not yet authorised always counts as confirmed supply. I think this might be the place for Dear to look first. If only authorised/approved POs were considered, then probably both requirements would be satisfied.)
A long-running (multi-day) production process where components are delivered JIT from a blanket PO can start under the current functionality, even when the JIT arrival of components in four days has not happened when the job starts. In other words, the job must be able to start without the components being available (Note that currently, this requires a resource to exist in the first step, not only components, even a dummy resource, which might be a bug, Dear is looking into it). An extreme example of such a production run is a glass furnace, in my case, the example is extrusion of PVC pipes.
It might seem like the solution is to split into multiple production runs, but this incurs multiple setup costs, which isn't true, and if setup is expensive, this breaks the costing. In fact, for my PVC customer, having to use multiple production runs would stop them using the Production module.
So the job needs to be schedulable with only the "promise" of future components. But I don't think that draft POs should count for this.
The above is my best understanding of the situation based only on limited experience with the module.
Hello, Tim,
How are you?
Please let me inform you that we included the requests you sent in the roadmap.
The updates for the operation start without resources and components will be available in the nearest future.
Best regards,
Elena
Hi
The 'Comments' mergefield isn't available to print on any of the production order documents? This field can't been seen in the MES app either.
It's important to be able to see these if there are any 'special make' requirements for a production order.
The 'Comments/Note' mergefield can be printed on all sale, purchase and other documents in Dear - is there a reason why this can't be printed on the production order docs?
Returning to the 'Co-Manufacturing' functionality:
We (a design and assembly house for products) use it to plan finishing processes like powder coat and anodising where a part we buy from one supplier gets sent to another for processing and transformation into a different part.
What that means is that the price for an operation in the 'finishing' resource varies from part to part, and we're looking at having to have a separate resource per part number in order to store pricing data, which is a bit of a fiddle and not so related to what we've got in real life where our suppliers quote a fixed price per part.
Copied and pasted from a conversation with Aron in support:
The absolute ideal would be to have a matrix for each process with prices per part for different suppliers, with MoQs / minimum charges. That'd be quite a lot of work for your dev team but it's often easier as a user if they system mirrors reality.
If the process is stored as a 'service part' could you add a table to the service part for suppliers and lead times, like for an inventory part? And then use that to populate PO?
Hello Matt,
How you are fine.
Could you please provide me with more detail on your scenario?
As far as I understand, your co-manufacturer executes some service for you and, in fact, you are paying for this service. Maybe the scenario for co-manufacturing with using Output as a service product will suit you:
https://support.dearsystems.com/support/solutions/articles/11000093889-co-manufacturing-outsourcing-parts-of-the-production-process-#Scenario6
Here is the point, that your purchase order contains finished product at 0 price and service product as additional costs. The cost of service product is posted to the finished product when co-manufacturing finishes.
Looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Best regards,
Elena
Hi Dear,
I see that more Manufacturing Module improvements are Planned.
Can you also provide the function to roll multiple orders back to a Planned state (from Released) ?
Hello John,
We are planning to release in the nearest future the following bulk actions for Production Orders:
Void - voids the order
Undo - returns the order to the Draft stage
Mark as Completed - completes the selected orders.
Please let me know if Undo functionality suits your needs.
Best regards,
Elena Piskova
Thanks Elena,
1. I assume this will include Void from Draft ?
2. Please can we have the option to Undo to 'Draft' or 'Planned' states (if it is Released) as this covers all the potential use cases.