There are times in the manufacturing environment when parts run out of stock, but alternatives do exist that can be used to complete the process.

Statistics are the foundation of the Six Sigma methodology and can be very useful in understanding manufacturing performance and for planning manufacturing improvement. It might be surprising to know that a lot of useful statistical data is likely already available in your manufacturing database.

Your MISys database will grow increasingly large over time and with that comes an excess of closed and old dated manufacturing orders, work orders, inventory snap shots, item cost history, job details and log transaction information. MISys housekeeping tools are available to purge some of those old records as shown below. It is highly recommended that a backup of the company is completed from the administration menu of MISys before any of these purges are attempted.

When entering materials on a Bill of Material (BOM) you have to choose one of 4 different options for the detail type on each line. Each of the 4 options pertains to how that line item calculates based on build quantity and how it transacts when the production order is being processed.

Successful manufacturing requires effectively bringing together resources, including materials, labor, and machinery to produce something of value. The manufacturing equation can get complex, so finding effective ways to reduce complexity is always a good priority.

When Routed Operations are synchronized to the introduction of Components, a ‘Bill of Material’ becomes a ‘Bill of Manufacturing’.

With larger Bills of Manufacturing, it can be challenging to visualize the relationship of operations, and into which operations components are being introduced into.

When building a Materials Management strategy from a forecast, a great way to view the output of MRP simulations is by running ‘Purchasing Advice’ and ‘Production Advice’. Enter the Master Production Schedule number for each simulated MPS run as shown below and run the report.

If you have serial or lot tracking enabled in your MISys database, a quick and easy way to look up those items and the associated serial or lot numbers is to review them in the stock control menu.

Manufacturing leaders are always interested in gaining more visibility about the future because visibility helps define strategy. For the Materials and Production Management leads, creating future strategy such as for the next quarter can be really challenging because it involves finding ways to accurately refine various sales forecast scenarios into the time phased material and production demands.

If you have serial or lot tracking enabled in your MISys database, you may notice that there are discrepancies between your master stock quantity and your total lot stock quantity; or that history of lot tracking has a few gaps. A critical area to review when using serial and lot tracking is the Assign Serial Lot Numbers section of stock control.

When investigating transactions, a handy report to know about is the Master Transaction Log. The log can be run with a variety of parameter settings (below) and can be exported to excel for additional analysis.

If you have gone through the stage of recording an inventory snapshot (as shown in previous post) – the next stage is to load that inventory snapshot into a physical inventory batch.