Question

Looking for some guidance on releasing of jobs in Epicor

  • 28 January 2022
  • 5 replies
  • 999 views
J
  • jmeyer
  • Participating Frequently
  • 9 replies

Historically we have been releasing all jobs to Epicor as soon as they have finished engineering them. We mark Engineered and released at the same time and try to let the scheduler distinguish priorities from there. The input we received from Epicor was that we have too many jobs concurrently release/in work in the system and that we should be controlling the flow by releasing when the job is due to start running.

 

Just curious how others are doing this and if they are not releasing right away, how they handle purchasing getting suggestions or non mfg operations such as programming getting claimed back to the jobs. Also, how do you determine the future load on the shop prior to releasing the jobs?

 

Thanks,

 

Jarred

5 replies

B
Userlevel 2

I have receiving release jobs when they receive materials. That way it is easy to tell if a job has materials available by it's status.  Especially helpful with purchased materials with long lead times.

J

I have receiving release jobs when they receive materials. That way it is easy to tell if a job has materials available by it's status.  Especially helpful with purchased materials with long lead times.

Thanks for the response! In your scenario here, how does purchasing get there suggestions on what and when to purchase these materials without the job being released?

B
Userlevel 1

We release jobs 2 weeks prior to the planned start date. We use the Production Planner Workbench to identify all production jobs scheduled to start in that 2 week window as well as if there are any missing parts. The jobs get released regardless of part status and our Material Management team gets a list of jobs with missing parts to status. 

If it’s determined parts won’t arrive on time, Planning is notified and makes the decision whether or not to start it with the missing parts. If the decision is NOT to start it, jobs are unreleased.

We went live in December 2020 and this is a still evolving process for us, but this seems to be working fairly well. We also created a custom dashboard to bring visibility to released status, operation and job completion status, % material issued, so we can quickly see what jobs are released, which ones are in process, which have materials picked but aren’t started and which have been released, but materials aren’t issued. That dashboard has been the best tool for understanding the status of our jobs

J

We release jobs 2 weeks prior to the planned start date. We use the Production Planner Workbench to identify all production jobs scheduled to start in that 2 week window as well as if there are any missing parts. The jobs get released regardless of part status and our Material Management team gets a list of jobs with missing parts to status. 

If it’s determined parts won’t arrive on time, Planning is notified and makes the decision whether or not to start it with the missing parts. If the decision is NOT to start it, jobs are unreleased.

We went live in December 2020 and this is a still evolving process for us, but this seems to be working fairly well. We also created a custom dashboard to bring visibility to released status, operation and job completion status, % material issued, so we can quickly see what jobs are released, which ones are in process, which have materials picked but aren’t started and which have been released, but materials aren’t issued. That dashboard has been the best tool for understanding the status of our jobs

 

Thanks for the response! We didn’t know anything about this tool! It looks like we only have a little bit of data loaded in it that is all very old. How does it get refreshed? Also, how does it know when to start a job if the job was never released and scheduled yet?

B
Userlevel 1

Run the Production Planning Process to define which jobs you want to pull into the workbench. We run it so all production jobs that have unissued materials will populate. 

 

We run this at least weekly, but really any time we want to get an up to date look at jobs for Planning purposes. 

We schedule our jobs when they are created and we release by planned start date with consideration to required by dates (if we’re falling behind schedule). The workbench shows Start, Due, and Required By dates, so you could use whatever makes the most sense for Planning for your business. 

Jobs highlighted yellow have part shortages:

 

We customized this some as well. We added the total estimated prod hours column and we may have hidden or shown some other columns. 

Our planner exports this list to excel, makes decisions about what needs to be released, and then uses Job Status Maintenance to release jobs in Mass by pasting the list of jobs to be released in the List view grid and then selecting Release All. 

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