Has anyone ever integrated a third-party MRP? Our sourcing team is considering getting a third party “advanced” planning/scheduling tool that would in essence replace Epicor’s MRP and bring in all our sourcing across all our divisions (some of which don’t use Epicor).
Just looking to see if we’ll be trailblazing in unknown waters. 
Anyone use Epicor’s advanced MRP module? It’s not the standard MRP, titled “Advanced Planning & Scheduling module”
Advanced Planning & Scheduling is the normal scheduling but beefed up using Finite Capacity, Constrained Materials, etc. It also adds new dashboards such as the Multi-Resource Scheduling boards. OH… and you can assign more than 2 resources per operation AND you can also use the “Capabilities” feature of Resources which allows you to specify that you need a resource “Capable” of a function.
Capabilities are really nice when you have machines that are in different resource groups, but maybe with a capability that crosses over those RGs… example: you might e resource groups for 3 axis, 4 axis and 5 axis CNC machines… but when you look at the 4 axis machine, it is also capable of doing 3 axis work. When you get into Capabilities, you can specify this cross functional ability, and can also change efficiencies for each resource in that capability.
Thanks @timshuwy, they’re looking to something that is not just manufacturing but that’d take into account all our vendors. Example, instead of part “Widget1234” always coming from Supplier XYZ it’d evaluate multiple vendors. Also if there are parts were we either Mfg or source from a supplier it’d base which path to go based on factors.
Specifically we’re currently looking at: Vanguard (planning), Blue Jay (TMS) and 3G (TMS)
then challenge you might have in using something outside is getting that system to know and understand your internal constraints, and then getting the schedule pushed back into the operation scheduling and material schedules. There are lots of date fields in jobs that would need to get updated. Also you would need to turn off any built in scheduling inside of Epicor.
Yeah, it’ll be “interesting times” if they decide to pull the trigger on this.
one time, I had a customer who wanted to completely change how the scheduling worked… they needed the operations to all be “Duration based” (as opposed to “Work based” which is how our scheduling works). So… each operation had a “duration” listed in a UD FIeld (5 days, 10 days, etc)… then we made a BPM that ran AFTER the job was scheduled, and we made our own scheduling logic to float around all the operations (and associated materials) based on the duration which was based on the UD Field. It was possible, and worked well, but there are a bunch of dates per operation, resource, and material that had to be adjusted (Start, end, Queue, Move, etc, etc). Multiply that times 2 because we also had to change the “What If” schedules so that when you looked at the Job Scheduling board, it was still easy to read.