Suggested by Guy Terry – New
In D365 SCM, Item substitution functionality allows Master planning to substitute a component or ingredient item on a production order. When you set up item substitution, you assign BOM or Formula lines to a specific Plan group. An item can be substituted for a different item with the same Plan group. Items within the same Plan group are assigned a priority, and the highest priority item is the item that is normally consumed.
When Master planning runs, it uses the highest priority item if it's available. If the highest priority item isn't available, Master planning looks for the next highest priority item with available inventory. If no substitute items are available, Master planning creates a planned order for the highest priority item.
I believe a relatively simply change would allow Plan group functionality to support Item supersession.
Item supersession is a scenario where a component item or ingredient is permanently superseded by a different item. In Item supersession scenarios, it is a common requirement to consume all inventory of the 'old' item before switching to the 'new' item.
If Plan group logic supported the following behaviour, it would be possible for Plan groups to support Item supersession scenarios:
When Master planning runs, it uses the highest priority item if it's available. If the highest priority item isn't available, Master planning looks for the next highest priority item with available inventory. If no substitute items are available, Master planning creates a planned order for the lowest priority item.
If Plan groups supported this logic, the 'old' item could be configured as the highest priority item, and the 'new' item could be configured as the lowest priority. This logic would also support supersession chains.... where ItemA is replaced by ItemB is replaced by ItemC etc.
Later, when inventory of the 'old' item is exhausted, a manual task for the production planners could be to update the BOMs/Formulas to remove lines for the 'old' item, and remove the Plan group settings if appropriate.
It is particularly important that this idea be addressed by Microsoft, because the relevant logic sits inside Planning Optimisation, and cannot be changed by Partners or End Users.
Guy,
This is just a business process change (the way this is worded). Your two lines that specify old and new code behavior are word for word identical (rightly so). I see your approach as a solution, but no change to Planning Optimization is needed. In addition to your planner following up manually with BOM changes I’d like to see a Plan Group of Superseding limited to only 2 lines since the priority value is confusing and now redundant.
However, I’d prefer to see the “Use-up Engineering Change” capability seen in so many other ERP solutions. Here, effectivity dates are used and kept up to date (a change inside Planning Optimization MPS) to the date where MRP projects a transaction driving inventory of the old item in the Planning group negative. This does imply a likelihood of a small residual inventory of the old item, but so does your recommendation – easy to report on. Multi lines (e.g. these 2 new items supersede 3 items on the old BOM) would simply leverage phantom items in the plan group. No change to Planning Optimization and no manual step, A new checkbox column on the old and new BOM lines set to Use-up equals true and a new column declaring the same Use-up group (Plan Group could work, but why not).
Hi,
I voted on the idea, not really based on the solution but i fully agree that we are struggling how to implement changes of items by the means of first consuming all old on-hand and then switching over.
We are currently looking for ways how to implement this with minor changes but it seems all functionality we have are only parts of the solution and not an end 2 end solution/process.