Use of PO Desired Recv Date field

We have encountered a small conundrum with the setting of the Desired Recv Date on PO's.

It is our understanding that this date is important to scheduling as it indicates when the contents of the PO are available for use/consumption. However, we seem to have encountered a procedural issue with this, as this date is printed on our PO's as a Required by Date. As a result our purchasing department has been changing this date in order to communicate to the vendors when the goods need to be delivered to us. Which is good, but the these dates are messing up scheduling as the goods are not actually available for use on those date, especially when the PO's are FOB Origin.

The following two example may explain this a little more clearly.

In the first example the Items on the PO are FOB Destination. In this example the generated Planned PO indicates that the goods are needed on Sept 1. A PO created from the planned PO will have it's Desired Recv Date set to Sept 1. Purchasing knows that the goods are need for Sept 1, but they also know that it can take a day or so for the shipment to be received and quality controlled before they are available for consumption. So they change the date to be a day or two earlier to allow for this processing. This is great for the vendor, not so great for scheduling as the date does not truly reflect when the goods are available for consumption.

The Second example is similar to the first one, it is just more pronounced. In this case the PO is FOB Origin and like the first example we have an initial Desire Recv Date of Sept 1. However, this is our production need date not the date we want the order to be delivered to our origin point. In our case FOB Origin is usually a port in Asia which means the delivery date to port should be 4 weeks prior to need date. So our purchasing department will change the Desired Recv Date to be Aug 2. Which is good for directing the vendor, but again does not truly reflect when the goods are available for consumption.

So the conundrum here is how do we keep scheduling happy with a Desired Recv Date that reflects true availability but allows purchasing to control when vendors need to deliver the goods.

We have some ideas on how we can do this, but we thought we reach out and see how others may have addressed this issue.

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Comments

marvin-schultz

We are having the exact same conundrum! In fact when I was reading your email, I had to look your profile up to make sure you weren't someone in my company. I'm eager to find out what others have found as a solution.

unknown

We built in move hours between the cutting operation (1st) and the next operations to allow for processing and handling time. Our cutting operations are set to the pace of our constrained resources.

Another option would be similar to how we handle customer order dates. I changed the acknowledgement form to print out a different date field if filled in, allowing the date that drives the shop to be set earlier than the acknowledged date to the customer. -----This is not what we do for our purchase orders as we have not found this to be a major problem. We manage the exceptions by moving the release date out on specific work orders from time to time.----

Let me know what you think. Of these options, I'm curious how others tackle these challenges. Perhaps there easier solutions. This is what (hopefully) works for us to smooth out material flow in our shop from all aspects.

unknown

We use the "Move Hrs" function as well to add delay between scheduling concurrent operations.

marvin-schultz

What is the "Move Hrs" function? I was unable to find it in Purchase Order Entry or the Purchase Management Window.

unknown

Move hours is a field in the manufacturing window. Open up an operation card, on your setup/run tab you will see move hours below the note section. This is a field that will be controlled most often by scheduling / manufacturing.

unknown

Thank you all for your input.

After some discussion and testing here we came to the conclusion that Visual doesn’t currently have an ability to generate/set a vendor delivery date that is separate from the Desired Recv Date field. Something that we think should be available. We did review the Move Hours comments and quickly discounted its use as it only applies to operational moves within EM’s and we looking at general raw material deliveries.

So what we decided to do, is make use of the Promise Delivery Date field on the PO. Our purchasing department will make use of this field whenever they need to indicate an earlier delivery date than the scheduled Desired Recv Date. Primarily this will be used when the PO’s are FOB-Origin and the vendor needs to deliver earlier that the Desired Date. We have modified the PO .RDP form to use the Promise Date, when found, as the Desired Date on the form.

One small caveat here. Use of a delivery schedule on the PO will basically negate using the promise date as there is no ability to specify an overriding Promise date for each delivery date specified. Fortunately we make little use of this feature.

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