Re: Material Requirements Explosion

Eric,

In a message dated 6/8/99 2:51:44 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
estevens@adrus.com writes:

> We need to produce a weekly report listing ingredients required to produce 
> items for order fulfillment the following week.  There aren't a lot of 
orders/
> items involved.  Our users find setting up a full MRP run to be 
time-comsuming
> and overkill versus their needs.
>
>  Items and quantities to be produced would be input.  Referencing the BOM,  
the
>  process needs to account for ingredient quantity on-hand, committed and on-
>  order then calculate the variance to requirements.  This will allow the 
user to
>  quickly review the listing and determine if purchasing is needed to meet
>  production.
>  
>  Does anyone know of a quasi-quick and dirty way to address this?  What 
>  approach would you use?
<<snip>>

What is wrong with MRP?  If the inventory is correct, the orders (both 
purchase and customer) are correct, the bills of material are correct, and 
the routings are correct -- all required for your "quick and dirty" solution 
-- how much more trouble would entering a master schedule and running MRP be? 
 If there aren't many orders or items, running MRP shouldn't take that long.  
Entering items manually not only _BEGS_ for errors to be introduced into the 
system (even doing it _RIGHT_, my current primary client has repeatedly 
entered orders for 10 _MILLION_ yards instead of 10 _THOUSAND_), but also 
begs for important customer orders to _NOT_ be taken into account.

Have you ever written a routine to handle phantoms in this environment?  
Especially the "stockable" phantoms that BPCS allows (Roger should be shot 
for this)?  Ugly.  Sounds more like a lack of training/hardware performance 
than a need for new programs, IMO.  Even the "quick and dirty" reports I've 
written in the past have been based upon the data generated by an unmodified 
MRP/CAP system from the vendor that originally wrote the package.  Perhaps 
you could elaborate on why the users find MRP to be "time-consuming and 
overkill"?

Regards,

Dean Asmussen
Enterprise Systems Consulting, Inc.
Fuquay-Varina, NC  USA
E-mail:  DAsmussen@aol.com

"BPCS -- Better Programs Coming Soon" -- Anonymous
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