Symptoms - we noted that we had significant changes to job numbers during the day. Sometimes gaps of over 100 plus jobs. Simple query of job header by create date indicated this.
After hours of examining data directives, method directives and customizations, decided to put a change log on the next job number field in company config. Found that every time MRP ran, it changed the next job number field 21 times.
We have 7 sites - so perhaps a math coincidence?
Has anyone else seen this?
This is on version 10.2.400.5
What MIGHT be happening is that MRP creates jobs, and then later does a second pass and combines jobs based on minimums, or safety stock, or EOQ, etc. When it does its first pass, I believe it simply creates 1 to 1 supply/demand jobs. I bet if you look at the job just before or after the gap, you will find a job for a part with a higher quantity, but with lots of small demands.
The gap we are seeing is not with Unfirm Jobs. MRP seems to be updating the next job number on the JCSYST table. So what we see is when a user creates a new job using quick job entry, or job entry, the next job number is a jump. Here is what is actually happening. Lets say we have job number 111111 as our last job. We run MRP. The next job number that is created with Quick Job Entry is now 111132. Putting a change log on the next job number field is indicating that every time MRP Runs, the next job number changes 21 times. The unfirm jobs that are generated are sequential and use the unfirm prefix that we have identified for the different sites.
We’ve seen this as well, and it increments the job counter by 20 jobs each time. The cause seems to be related to manual job creation in the shop occurring while MRP is executing.
Since the recommended method is to run MRP during off-hours, that is how we solved this problem. In a 24 hour working environment, we would have had to investigate further.
Interesting.
I ran this in our test environment which had no other users than myself. No jobs getting created. Still incremented the job number. There is something in MRP that is creating new firm jobs. The next job number field is updated 20 times upon immediately starting MRP.
The only reason we noticed it and starting digging was due to MRP kicking off every 5 minutes. Which was another problem altogether. The result was that on any given day, we were seeing jumps in the next job number in the ranges of 200 to 300 jobs. The daily count of jobs when busy is only around 50 to 60.