Are you manually planning your jobs and POs from shortage lists? If so, you know how complicated manufacturing planning is. With manual planning, you can never reach your full efficiency potential because no human can make the rapid calculations that a properly designed MRP program can.

DBA provides you with simple planning tools that automatically generate jobs and POs for you. With these tools, you can reduce inventory and improve your on time delivery with fewer shortages and lower expediting costs.

Here we are looking at the Shop Calendar, where you define the weekends and holidays that are not available for production.

Here in the MRP Settings screen is where you maintain the key settings that drive MRP.

The first setting is the Reorder Level, which applies to manufactured and purchased items. Whenever MRP senses that net demand falls below the Reorder Level, it will generate a planned job or PO. If you make or purchase the item to order, you set the Reorder Level to zero and whenever demand materializes, a job or PO will be triggered.

Here on the Usage tab, you see each item's past 12 months usage, organized into quarters with monthly averages so that you can see trends in demand. This number down here gives you a suggested Reorder Level that covers not only the average usage, but also a safety factor to cover the highest usage within the period.

There are two key settings maintain against each of your manufactured items. The Lead Days is the number of days it normally takes before you can start a job. This gives you time to procure material or make lower level subassemblies. The Job Days is the number of production days required to make the item. You can click the button in this field to launch the Job Days Calculator, which estimates the number of job days based on the item's routing specifications and current work center capacity settings.

When you enter a sales order for a make to order item, the program automatically establishes a Required Date forward from the current date by the items Job Days plus Lead Day, skipping over any non-workdays defined on the shop calendar. This gives MRP a realistic delivery date to plan for.

If the item is custom manufactured to each order, it can be designated as a CTO, custom to order item. In this case, MRP will generate jobs directly from sales order lines, for the exact quantity ordered.

For purchased items, the Lead Days is the number of days allocated by MRP for getting the item delivered from the supplier.

Armed with these item settings, you can then run MRP, which is a three step process.

First you generate and convert planned jobs for CTO, custom to order items directly from sales order lines, Next, you generate and convert planned jobs in response to net demand. And finally, you generate and convert planned purchase orders in response to the newly created jobs.

Planned jobs are listed on this screen and can be reviewed before converting into actual jobs. Planned jobs are backward scheduled from Required Dates by each item's Job Days and Lead Days settings. You can click the Demand icon to see the underlying supply and demand details behind each planned job.

When all the planned jobs are selected for conversion, you click the Convert checkbox and they are converted into actual jobs.

If net demand for subassemblies occurs within the newly created jobs, you are prompted by the program to generate once again to capture this additional demand.

Planned POs are displayed and converted in the same fashion and are backward scheduled from required dates by each item's Lead Days setting. You can change suppliers if you wish. As with planned jobs, you can click the Demand icon to see the underlying demand and supply details behind each planned POs.

After all your planned POs are selected for conversion, you click the Convert button to convert them into actual purchase orders. You have the option of combining items by supplier into a single PO.

If you wish to explore these MRP processes in more detail, see our System Workflow video series. In particular, view these segments – Refine Settings, Generate Jobs, and Generate POs.

Our MRP design is ideal because it is relatively simple with clear visibility of all the numbers and where they are coming from. All the same logic utilized in manual planning can be applied to the item MRP settings to generate jobs and POs in a fraction of the time with far more accuracy. MRP plays a crucial role in helping you reduce inventory, improve on time delivery, with fewer shortages and lower expediting costs.