Replenish Material

Material management balances inventory so that there is enough supply for production, while avoiding excess to increase efficiency and reduce inventory costs. Just-in-time inventory ensures that materials are replenished only when required in the production process. Accuracy in demand forecasting is critical because material shortage could shut down production and disrupt the supply chain.

Master Production Scheduling considers supplies and demands based on quantities by consolidating individual orders and material per period throughout the supply chain. Supply is typically material on stock, purchased or planned. Demand comprises customer orders, forecasts, and stock targets.

Material replenishment ensures that supplies and demands are in balance. Master Production Scheduling supports multiple routings per product so that alternate sourcing and production methods are considered based on the relative benefits of cost and lead time. Product substitution on routing inputs is supported to help maximize material utilization and minimize inventory-related constraints.

Master Production Scheduling supports the ability to represent multiple manufacturing levels or “decoupling points” via stocking points. Each stocking point represents a point of product inventory accumulation that can be consumed by multiple demand types including customer, work order, and transport demands. Supply chain optimization supports up to 6 stocking point levels and up to 30 stocking points overall.

Multi-level material replenishment

Material replenishment is performed by quantity in a product unit of measure (Tons, Pounds, Kilos, Each, etc.).

Master Production Scheduling supports a standard cycle for evaluating and releasing supply orders proposed by the optimizer and publishing this data back to an ERP or MES system. Manual creation and publishing of proposed supplies is also supported.

Standard supply order confirmation cycle

Proposed supply orders can be reviewed, released and published back to the external system in the supply order planning view. Planners may also view material reservations from the Material Planning Overview where net inventory positions are represented in configurable time buckets. One or many time bucket nodes can be selected to show associated material replenishment and reservation detail for the selected period.