If you want MRP to plan for both plants, then you have to make the
information that it uses available to it. That means that you must have all
the sales orders, purchase orders, shop floor orders, bills of material,
inventory levels, and forecasts that you want it to plan with available in
one set of files on the same machine.
Are you trying to consolidate purchasing, do you load balance capacity and
inventories between the locations, or are you trying to be thrifty with
computer resources and implementation money?
If you want to have one planning run in Washington that plans for both
Washington and for the Netherlands then either (a) the information named
above must be moved to a single system, consolidated, and the job executed
or (b) you must create something (like logical files or views or ?) that
allows the program to think that the information has been consolidated into
one set of files or (c) you must modify the application to access files in
multiple locations (partitioned data).
If you are willing to customize the application, you can probably make the
job running in one place refer to both local data and remote data. The last
time I looked carefully, the standard app didn't do that. If you customize,
beware of issues with record keys that aren't unique across both systems.
If you try to access inventory levels both locally and remotely while the
job is running, beware of network performance issues. The same applies for
sales orders, purchase orders, and all the other data.
Of course, you can always make a run in the Netherlands and a separate run
in Washington. If the two locations create demand on each other, send sales
orders from site one to site two and the MRP will consider them. If the two
sites transfer raw materials or finished goods between them to fulfill
demand or load balance capacity, that is a complex situation and I think
that you should be on one machine. If finished goods manufacturing starts
at site one and finishes at site two then you have a complex implementation
and you will probably be better off with a single system.
This sounds like a fun project!
Richard Jackson
Richard Jackson and Associates Ltd.
IBM Business Partner
mailto:
[email protected]
http://www.richardjacksonltd.com
Telephone: 1 (303) 808-8058
-|