Has anyone else noticed that the Production Planner Workbench totally screws up when you have late to start jobs?
For example, the following part is showing On Hand as the sum of all the jobs required Qty AND shortages are not calculated correctly:
Also, you can ignore the Expedite PO Suggestions, but there is no way to Ignore the non expedite PO Suggestions. This means that production planner will go along thinking all is well, when purchasing has not converted the suggestion to an actual PO… this seems very dangerous to me.
Ok. I think I’ve worked it out, but I’m really not happy with the way this dashboard works.
In the first example, the ‘On Hand’ in the ‘All Parts’ section is actually (On Hand + Planned PO Receipts)
In the second example, I had reserved the 95 On Hand to job 000014 so it’s not considered available. The problem is that it doesn’t consider that reserved quantity when calculating the required quantity for the job 00014, so says that we’re short.
It really needs to either disregard the reservations OR subtract them from the job Required Qty OR add to the job Available Qty.
In all honesty, we don’t use Production Planner workbench. We use Time Phase and drive our activity (be it movement of jobs, or expediting/delaying/ordering material) from suggestions without using the workbench.
I can see how you’d use Time Phase to drive the activity, however, I like the concept of the production planner workbench. The production planner should be able to see, at a glance, the jobs that will run into material issues. Just a shame that it’s missing some vital information. I’ve also added a customization to hide the material tabs depending on the parent tab (Parts of Jobs) that has been selected which makes it much more intuitive.
Can’t argue with your point, although I have seen “Planner Workbench” work quite a bit differently in different ERP systems. Sometimes, it works really well. Can’t say I’ve found any usability in the Epicor version.
Time to update my prior posts. We have been testing Production Planner Workbench and found it to be an effective way to identify shortages.
The way it functions is a bit odd, though. A part is identified as a shortage if it is not on hand for a job start. That’s OK for some plants, but in our case, our lead time is so long that we don’t need to have supporting parts at the time of job start.
What we are testing is the following.
For an identified shortage item in Production Planner Workbench, look at the part in Time Phase, and turn off suggestions. If there are any negative values, we discuss the pending change requests and get on procurement to follow up with a degree of urgency. Since most of our suggestions are more of an “inventory adjust” nature, it appears to be an effective way to differentiate those from suggestions that can negatively impact production.
So, we don’t use the inventory values in Epicor’s production planner workbench, we just use the information as a guide to tell us which items to prioritize from the massive glut of purchasing suggestions.
