Currently to forecast some of our demand of our configurable Finished Goods we create firmed jobs for the top-level Phantom on a particular BOM, but it hasn’t worked out as well as we’d like simply because all the way down the BOM it is “static” demand, unless we make it “dynamic” by keeping it up with a lot of manual watching/manipulating.
So I have been playing around with using Forecast Entry to enter a proper forecast (for all non-phantom child parts on a BOM) that will consume the forecast as we fulfill that expected demand. However, the Epicor Help on Forecast Entry notes this about the forecast created:
As sales orders are created for a specific part, the MRP engine uses the quantities on these sales orders to determine the Consumed Quantity value on forecasts.
Well, that doesn’t really work when it won’t allow you to enter a forecast for a configurable part and the configurable part is what would get entered on the Sales Order, not the components. So I can import a forecast for all of the components and MRP will create unfirm jobs to fulfill them, but the forecast consumed quantity never goes above 0, which results in the forecast required quantity never decreasing. Unless I was to--again, manually--reload the forecast every time we consumed a part against that forecast. Tracking that, let alone actually doing that, would be way more work than we do now.
So how are you supposed to forecast configurable parts? How do you forecast in a way to not artificially inflate demand, drive your Buyers to purchase too much inventory (because they like to just click the buttons, rather than investigate why they’re being asked to buy something), and spend all of your Planner’s time monitoring actions against a forecast?
(we are on the most current version of Epicor 10, on Multi Tenant, switching to Public Cloud in a few weeks)