Dear all,

The purchasing department of our client would like MRP to automatically choose the supplier with lowest price for their planned purchase orders. We are currently looking into the supply chain strategy feature of Enterprise Planning to assess its viability. After setting it up, however, it's still not choosing supplier with lowest transport WIP. In fact, it wouldn't choose the correct supplier from our test suppliers no matter what priority rule we choose. (We have several test items each connected through multiple test suppliers through item supplier information)

Now we looked at our training material back from year 1999 and saw a note there saying that the supply chain strategy wasn't working well with MRP, but was OK with MPS. Is it still the case? Or has anybody successfully use supply chain strategy for their vendor selection in MRP? Thanks very much

Rgds,
Paul

Paul:

This does work within the Order Horizon. In other words, it does work for MRP. I have set this up many times.

I do not have access to a Baan system, but if I remember correctly, setting this up was accomplished by using a combination of the Supply Chain Strategies sessions. The other key here, if I remember correctly, was to leave blank certain default supplier information in the Item Sub-Entities.

I apologize for not being able to be more detailed. Like I mentioned, I have not been on the system in several months. I can tell you that it does work and I also remember the set up being not so obvious as you might think.

As for the training materials developed in 1999, the entire EP book was re-written, or edited I should say, in 2002.

Sorry I couldn't be a greater help.

Jon P. Elliott CPIM

Thanks for the info, Jon. Do you know where we can get hold of these new EP materials? We checked Baan Support in the documentation area but all the EP documents there for 5c is back from 2000, practically the same with what we have in our documentation CD. Thanks

By the way, following is how we set up our vendor selection in MRP. We created a supply chain strategy and connected it to our actual scenario. Then, for all plan level 1 items of this supply chain strategy, we define that our external supplier (purchase) selection strategy should be based on lowest transport WIP. Now, we have set up several purchased items (that are needed by several manufactured items in BOM) with no default supplier in their item purchase data. These items each have different suppliers defined in item supplier information, with each combination have their own priority and supply time values.

However, using the above set up, MRP still can't find the desired supplier. For example, it can't even find the supplier with highest priority - i.e. lowest priority number - when we are using priority as our purchasing supplier selection strategy. Did we set up wrongly or is it a bug? We currently have a support request case with Baan Support, but at this critical stage of implementation, they are not responding fast enough for our comfort.

Thanks very much

Rgds,
Paul

Paul:

I went through all the steps that you are going through. I did get it to select properly. I don't remeber how. Since being laid-off, I have not had access to a Baan environment. Give me a system and I could work it out again.

The EP material was revised this past summer by an internal group at Baan in Grand Rapids. I know that they basically revised the material created in 1999. In addition, I wrote exercises and documentation covering the areas of WLC, CTP/ATP, DRP/Clusters, Family Planning, Forecasting, Supply Chain Strategy, Simulations/Indicators etc... as well as basic exercises covering Order Based and Master Based Planning. All in all, I believe I authored about 150 pages of material. These materials were written for advanced users. People who already understood basic manufacturing as well as navigation. I also created DEM flows to coincide with the session flow of the exercises. Users could import and use the DEM flows to follow the exercises. These exercises were not based on any specific company data. In other words, they should work, with some obvious pitfalls being corrected, on any Baan 5c environment.

I do not know who has the material now. I worked in Sales Consulting...the pre-sales group. Perhaps if you talked to your account executive and had him/her contact the pre-sales group manager? The Support people probably wouldn't even know of the materials' existence.

Jon P. Elliott CPIM

Dear Jon,

Baan Support finally finished handling this case. I'm sure if access to BaanERP system was made available to you, you would've beaten them to it. Turned out that technically it was a small problem; I left item group and item code fields in supply strategy empty assuming it means all items. What I should've done is fill the items one by one in supply strategy. Hassle isn't it? Now by that, we solve the technical side of the dilemma.

Problem is, the functional side is not yet solved. There's no supply strategy that will make MRP to automatically choose supplier with lowest purchase price. There are 3 strategies available; priority, least transport time, and least transport WIP. We thought that least transport WIP will give us the feature we want. But as Baan Support consultant told us, least transport WIP would just give exactly the same result as least transport time for purchased items. This is because least transport WIP just finds supplier with least (supply time x item standard cost price). Since for any supplier, the item standard cost price is the same, then least transport WIP basically finds supplier with least supply time, i.e. same with least transport time

So, alas, we can't make MRP to automatically choose supplier with the lowest price for us

Rgds,
Paul

HELLO

i DONT HAVE VERY DETAILED IDEA ABOUT MRP

but i can assure u if the problem is limited only to select Transporter/ subcontractor/supplier you can do it using transportation
there you can define subcontractor service levels, rates & system gives you detailed list of comparisions for all subcontractors

so taht you can make choice among them

regards
sammeer

hope my sugestion is not out of way what you asked for!!!!!

Dear Sammer,

Thanks for the pointer. We were actually talking in terms of BaanERP (5.0c to be exact) and unfortunately I can't make use of your suggestion because there's no Transportation module in 5.0c. However, your suggestion will probably work wonders for BaanIV :) . Have a great day!

Rgds,
Paul