To the Board -

When using the EBOM's and PBOM's I have the follwoing problem:

Assume that assembly P (rev A) consists of parts 1,2,and 3 and if it is modified so that part 2 is replaced by part 4 with rev B on the engineering side and the effective date is set to 45 days from now. The EBOM is released and rolled to the PBOM side. Now part 2 will have a Expiry Date of 45 days from now and part 4 will have a Start Date of 45 days from now. This is all fine until two weeks from now when we need to make a change to this same assembly but now need to replace part 1 with part 5 and make it effective immediately. The system will not allow this next change to be effective before day 46 because of the effectivity of rev B. I cannot unrelease rev B because it has been copied to the production side. Is there a way to handle this problem so that the material planners see the change in the MRP and the engineers can still make other changes as needed?
Thanks

I assume that you set your PBOM effectivity dates globally by setting the ECO effectivity date out 45 days when you processed it. The thing to do is to let the ECO default to today's date so that all changes are effective immediately. Then you can go to the PBOM and manually adjust effectivity/expiry dates of specific BOM lines as required.

This requires manual changes when the ECO is done, but allows the rest of the system to do what it should be doing as far as MRP, etc. We set tentative dates when the ECO is processed, then production control monitors the date as it approaches and fine tunes it as necessary. The risk should be low, but you also have to watch for any subsequent changes that might affect the same BOM line.

For the BOM that's already giving you a problem, I'm not sure how to overcome the date issue other than using GTM to change the ECO and revision effectivity dates? Or, if possible, wait for your 45 days to be up.

Jim

Dear Tom,

You should only release a revision just before it is active in production (for your case, say 44 days later). As long as it is not near the activation time yet, the revision should have been kept to engineering department only. This would have prevented such problem.

For your current case, probably the best is to modify the production BOM directly without going through all the revision control procedures.

Regards,
Paul

Paul -
Thanks for your reply. We are still looking at how to deal with the timing issues so that the ERP system knows about the change and the production people can get on with their work.
Regards
Tom