Can MRP Break Everything? (Help!)

Kinetic ERP
1

Has anyone else had the MRP process break everything?!
Ok, maybe not everything… but it felt pretty close to that last week.

We have MRP (regen) run in the early morning hours every weekday. Last Thursday morning was no different. MRP finished successfully and all was quiet. Our schedulers also run MRP (net change) a couple time during the day too. Mid-morning Shipping called to say they can’t ship from a sales order. They were getting “Cannot Ship From Unfirm Job”… even though they weren’t shipping from a job.

When our Schedulers were trying to firm up their jobs for the day, they were getting “The demand job is not firmed, do you wish to continue?”… even though the parent job was in fact firmed already.

All our Transfer Order Lines that had not fully shipped yet disappeared.

We could not generate jobs from our sales orders using Order Job Wizard. That error was “Part detail not found”.

None of our PO’s were showing in Time Phase so it was generating a bunch of unneeded PO suggestions.

We found that a TON of data was missing from the PartDtl table and impacting each area above. Epicor Support is providing data fixes for some of these items to repopulate PartDtl. We fixed the sales order releases ourselves by running an update DMT to uncheck/recheck the “make” flag on all open sales order releases.

However, I’m looking for the “WHY” and “HOW” of this issue. I don’t want this to happen again. It was/is very disruptive to our business. The only answer I’m getting from Support on my 5 open cases regarding this is basically “if you can’t reproduce it, we can’t troubleshoot it”.

I have the logs from that last Regen run of MRP on that day, but I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’m not even 100% sure it was MRP’s fault. What standard processes in Epicor can delete mass amounts of data from the PartDtl table?
Has anyone else encountered this type of issue? If so, what was the culprit?

2

Open the logs and do a search (Ctrl + F) for the word error. That’s always helpful to me.
I’ve found that a BPM can mess some things up you wouldn’t expect. Any BPMs on any of the tables related to MRP?

3

Nope, I had searched for “error” and only a couple random unfirm jobs popped up an error about not finding a revison for one of our spare parts… not the end of the world. I also searched for “fail” in the logs but got no hits. So far I’ve stumped Support on all of my 5-6 cases that I have open for this issue. We don’t have any BPMs or customizations around PartDtl. We have a few change log BPMs on the Job, OrderRel, and PORel tables, that’s it. Should be nothing to cause concern.

4

You are not alone. Recently our PartDtl table crashed for the second time (first was back just prior to 2023.1.10, most recent was sometime just prior to Thanksgiving). Epicor has never provided any fix to rebuild partdtl despite numerous requests. We had to deal with tons of close and reopen on both our POs and Orders. This most recent we also had our Unfirmed Jobs affected and are working to get them cleansed. We still have an open ticket for this last instance, will let you know if anything comes out of it that might help you.