Dalriada
20th December 2004, 21:41
Hi All,
We have a MTO business model and we are running into problems with how to do the forecasting. Can anyone give advice as to what is the best forecasting and planning method to address the MTO model? (PCS, Planning BOMs, Critical BOM, SIC ???)
Here is our situtuation:
1. Our product is highly customizeable and on top of that, the customer can ask us to include commerical off-the-Shelf cards to fill open system slots. This makes for a significant quantity of possibile options and end configurations. Because of this it is not practicle to define all of them up-front.
2. We don't know in advance what end configuration the customer will order and yet we must deliver the end configuration in 3 - 7 days after customer order. For us to make this lead time requirement we have to order long lead time parts and have them in house prior to customer order. Or assembly time is short.
3. Since we don't know the Top Level part numbe we can't forecast a top level item in MPS. We are using sales forcast to forecast the long lead and common parts. The problem is that when we do define and build a top level, the Sales forecast is not automatically consumed, so we have to manually decrement the Sales Forecast and this is becomming unmanageable.
4. We have looked at the PCS module but the main problem with the Generic BOM is that the percentages or qty's of the material lines can not be made to be different on a month to month basis, for example we want to forecast qty 10 power supplies in December but qty 50 in January BUT the qty of the Top level in MPS will remain the same (i.e. 20 in Dec, 20 in Jan). The G-BOM only allows us to set a qty/percentage of Bom lines for the entire plan and does not allow specific qty's per month.
I would appreciate any input you can give.
We have a MTO business model and we are running into problems with how to do the forecasting. Can anyone give advice as to what is the best forecasting and planning method to address the MTO model? (PCS, Planning BOMs, Critical BOM, SIC ???)
Here is our situtuation:
1. Our product is highly customizeable and on top of that, the customer can ask us to include commerical off-the-Shelf cards to fill open system slots. This makes for a significant quantity of possibile options and end configurations. Because of this it is not practicle to define all of them up-front.
2. We don't know in advance what end configuration the customer will order and yet we must deliver the end configuration in 3 - 7 days after customer order. For us to make this lead time requirement we have to order long lead time parts and have them in house prior to customer order. Or assembly time is short.
3. Since we don't know the Top Level part numbe we can't forecast a top level item in MPS. We are using sales forcast to forecast the long lead and common parts. The problem is that when we do define and build a top level, the Sales forecast is not automatically consumed, so we have to manually decrement the Sales Forecast and this is becomming unmanageable.
4. We have looked at the PCS module but the main problem with the Generic BOM is that the percentages or qty's of the material lines can not be made to be different on a month to month basis, for example we want to forecast qty 10 power supplies in December but qty 50 in January BUT the qty of the Top level in MPS will remain the same (i.e. 20 in Dec, 20 in Jan). The G-BOM only allows us to set a qty/percentage of Bom lines for the entire plan and does not allow specific qty's per month.
I would appreciate any input you can give.