Hi Everyone,
We have a client that experience challenges with rescheduling of production orders based on multilevel BOM’s. We would highly appreciate insights on how other organizations have handled similar challenges.
Questions to the community
- How can the client manage rescheduling of multi-level BOM’s?
- How have other organizations solved this kind of issues?
Client setup:
- Demand is created in projects as “Item requirements”. The item requirements are customer-specific finished goods.
- Finished goods consist of BOM-structure based on client-specific drawings.
- The BOM-structure consists of multiple levels. In total, a finished item can have around 10 levels in the BOM structure.
- Each level in the BOM’s are setup with line type “Item” or “Phantom”.
- Planning optimization is used to generate planned production orders and purchase orders.
- All “Item” levels in the BOM are created as separate planned production orders.
- All production orders related to a BOM structure are firmed at the same time, using “Extended” marking.
- Production orders are scheduled on resource level using “Job scheduling”, with finite material and infinite capacity.
- Each operation in the route is scheduled to one resource.
Current situation
- The extended marking creates a reference number for each production order in the form “All production orders”, showing the next order that should consume the semi-finished product.
- If new production orders are generated with higher prioritization, current production orders are rescheduled to a new date.
- All related production orders are most likely rescheduled to a new date that better suits the production schedule.
Experienced issues
- Even if production orders have a reference number pointing to other production orders, they are scheduled only in relation to themselves. When 100 production orders are related to each other, it is time-consuming to reschedule them separately and find an optimal production schedule.
- Previously, the field “Reference level” was updated in the form “All production orders” with the level between production orders. When rescheduling, the parameter “Schedule references” could be used to schedule all related production orders that was referenced with “Reference level”. All 100 production orders would then be rescheduled together in relation to each other.
- According to Microsoft, the “Reference level” functionality was removed in version 10.0.33, due to issues related to the cost in production orders. “Reference level” is only available if line type “Pegged supply” is used in the BOM’s.
- Microsoft has not provided any other suggestions how to manage the rescheduling after they removed “Reference levels”.
- Using “Pegged supply” in the BOM’s has been assessed, but the conclusion has been that it is not a good fit for the client. “Pegged supply” is certainly not suitable for all manufacturing companies.
- Using "Pegged supply" leads to an excessive number of production orders for semi-finished goods, which could otherwise be consolidated into a single production order. This causes a lot of artificially divided operations so time consumption needs to be bundled when reporting – and calculation of setup time will fail, as it would be only one setup time with a consolidated order.