Defining MCO Behavior

The Administrator can set various properties relating to MCOs.

This page discusses:

MCO Start Date Offset

Start date offset is an MBOM property that is used to enforce a minimum amount of time to offset from the creation of an MCO to the MCO start date.

The rationale for having this property setting is that there is a minimum amount of time required to transfer the MCO to the ERP / MRP system, qualify it, and release it into production. This allows the ERP production engineers to react and plan the implementation of MCOs being sent or updated from X-BOM Manufacturing. The property setting is stored as an integer measured in hours. See MBOM start date offset.

When an MCO start date is selected, the date calendar selection and date / time calculations are set to the context plant. The offset calculation simply adds the start offset value to the current plant date / time.

MCO Release Sequence

There is a complex algorithm that is used to check the MCO start date initial setting or update. When an MCO start date is set, the MCO start date algorithm checks affected item sequences (an item sequence represents an ordered change to an affected item).

  • The previous sequence MCO start date is checked to make sure the context sequence MCO start date is = > the previous sequence start date.
  • The subsequent sequence MCO start date is checked to make sure the context sequence MCO start date is =< the subsequent sequence MCO start date.

This sequence check is done for all the affected items on the MCO to ensure plant MBOM integrity.

MCOs With the Same Date

When there are multiple pending MCOs for the same plant with the same MCO release date, the current plant time is concatenated to the MCO start date to distinguish the release sequence.

You may see a start time with a plus or minus one minute adjustment. A user might select the same start date for a pending MCO that has a later sequence before a pending MCO with the same start date that has an earlier sequence. The earlier sequence MCO would fail the MCO start date check because the plant time is later for the earlier sequence MCO. The inverse could also happen. So the system checks to see if the MCO that caused the check failure has the same start date.

  • If the error occurred because the context MCO start time was later than expected, then the context MCO start time is changed to the MCO that caused the error minus one minute.
  • If the error occurred because the context MCO start time was earlier than expected, the context MCO start time is changed to the MCO that caused the error plus one minute.

The check is then rerun on the context MCO to validate that the adjustment did not cause another conflict.