Production Leveling

I am trying to find a way to use Production Leveling with MRP. I would appreciate any help or insight to make this happen.

An example: We have many products that have their peak season in November and December. The forecast shows that January through September, we will sell 10,000 products every month. October we will sell 20,000, November we will sell 100,000, and December we will sell 350,000. Based on the leadtime of 60 days and a 3 month average safety stock, MRP tells us that we need to start ordering the bulk of our products on September 1st.

The problem with this is that the production facility does not have the capacity for this, even after extending their hours and hiring temps.

We don't want to manipulate the forecast- it's a real forecast and it is what it is. Within Visual, is there a way to create a level production plan throughout the year without manipulating real data?

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Comments

Legacy Contributor

Are you using the Visual Scheduler and do you have the resources for the production facility set up accurately?

Legacy Contributor

We have a similar scenario for some of our parts. We have the MRP module and for those parts we select the Master Schedule order policy in Part Maintenance, and then in the material planning window we set up a master schedule to level load the parts so we produce a certain amount each month or every other month all year. This master schedule operates independently from the scheduler or your demand.
I have more info about htis if you are interested. For example master scheduling does some funny things if you have a safety stock set for a part that you master schedule.

marvin-schultz

Tom- No, we are not using the Visual Scheduler. Perhaps we should be? Our consultant didn't go over this with us. I'm not sure about the resources for the production facility. We don't actually produce anything ourselves... our production facilities are vendors that we have contracts with. Is there something I should look for specifically?

marvin-schultz

Gail, these parts are set to Master Schedule in Part Maintenance to the demand warehouse. Can you explain more what you mean by "in the material planning window we set up a master schedule to level load the parts"? How do you do that?

Legacy Contributor

You could set up resources based on your vendors, but sounds like Gail may have the solution you need.

Legacy Contributor

Also, as you look at using what Gail suggested--the "Master schedule" style of Order Policy for your parts along with using a Master Production Schedule since you are producing based on forecast, you might take a look at the Advanced Material Planning (AMP) module of Visual, which provides tools for managing forecast-based planning.

I'd also suggest the Visual User Guide for Inventory (visualinventory.pdf) and start with the section "Using Master Production Schedules".

Legacy Contributor

Christy,
In the material planning window, enter the part id that has been set to order policy = master schedule. Then go to File - Master Production Schedule. This is where you set up your master schedule for the part.
After lots of tests, I decided not to use the forecast side of the window. As far I could tell it would be useful only to export the forecast and import it to other parts and I could not get the exportimport to work correctly. If you do decide to use the forecast you can turn the forecast into a schedule.
What we did is come up with the schedule we wanted and entered it for one part. Then I wrote SQL scripts to populate all the other parts we wanted to master schedule. That's much faster than having someone create the schedule for each individual part. If the forecast eportimport worked right that would might also help but I got tired of mucking around with it.

Legacy Contributor

Christy,

I believe Gail is right on with how you can set a level load for production using the master schedule order policy for the part. You can bring your forecast into a customer order [populating each date requirement as a new line] and the part number will now show the actual forecast in the material planning window [MPW]. Since you have the part set to master schedule planning policy in part maintenance, you can now set the master schedule for the part and level load the total requirement in any manner you want. The schedule shows up on the supply side of the MPW and you can quickly see if your level load plan will meet all of the requirement dates from the forecast. We master schedule all of our top level parts and it works very well.

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