Sage 100

MRP question: If you enter a general forecast for an item but then enter a forecast for a customer, when you look at forecasted demand, are the two combined? More importantly, does anyone have a better alternative to the generic MRP module?

I have a customer who uses sales order quotes to manage their demand projections. This works pretty well for them and allows them to make projections for the current year, which the MRP module doesn't.

Interesting @GeneUlrich. My customer currently tracks their demand in spreadsheets (not very well, mind you) and would like to import it into MRP (which they own). They also have distributors who give them forecasts which they also want to monitor - how well did they forecast vs. what they have ordered? So if they enter quotes for their distributors, I guess that opens another route for tracking. Hmm....

I second Gene's idea. We had a customer who was doing contract bottling of perfumes, shampoos, etc. They received weekly forecasts from their customer on over 20-30 products for a rolling 52 weeks. They had to then turn that into a demand forecast for raw materials. Tried doing it with MRP but ran into a bunch of difficulties (don't remember them all. Instead we imported the forecast into a single SO Quote (numbered it uniquely so it could be identified). Each line was a unique combination of product and forecast week (line promise date) so we would have hundreds/thousands of lines on the quote, not a problem. We then used MRP to create the MRP Supply Demand File and used crystal to generate the necessary reporting (MRP reports all suck). The next week they delete the quote and start over. Worked pretty well.

I never understood why the MRP module does not let you enter demand for the current year. At any rate, I just recommended to a client to enter their demands in a sales order (we use order number 9999999) and then generate the MRP. Once that is complete they will delete all of the lines from the SO, so as not to impact the inventory available quantity. We opeted not to use quotes, since they did not want the MRP module to include quotes since they have a bunch of quotes for customers sitting out there.

Just another example of even back in the day when MAS was better managed, a module was slapped together (or acquired), put out for all to use then forgotten about. Version 1.0 was better than nothing, but Version 2.0 with all the improved bells and whistles never made it off the Idea web site. ""That was not what the client wanted""..................

It's been a while but I seem to remember entering current year demand by manually changing the date back a year in MRP ?

Yes, you have to enter the current year forecast using last year's date - try explaining that to the customer!

MRP is truly a legacy module.

MRP is definitely a creaky old module but as Wayne posted you can enter forecasts for the current year by leaving the prior year open and plugging the data in there - if you can explain that to the client. The issue we see quite often when they use the weekly forecast is the week dates differ from one year to the next which just adds to the confusion.

Forgot to add that if both an item forecast and a customer forecast are entered MRP does combine them.

Thanks @BernieLehman!