mBOM Serial Filtering within Assembly Planner
Traditionally, Assembly Planner has used dates to control the effectiveness of a part within a BOM, process, or delivery system. However, in the current manufacturing climate, more precision is needed in order to better control inventory, quality, and overall line flexibility. Proplanner has introduced the concept of unit serial filtering into most areas of the Assembly Planner software, with the most recent being mBOM serial filtering.
The concept is simple, with a date, a manufacturer can only effectively ‘use up’ old inventory assuming you start or stop using a part overnight. This can create waste in the form of unused inventory, or downtime due to part shortages.
However, if the exact inventory is known, as well as the units that require those parts, the exact unit where inventory would hit 0 can be known and identified. Once identified, this can be used as a ‘Break Point’ between an old and new part. This provides a more accurate and flexible way to provide information to the line. There are a few cases where this can be used to reduce issues that date would have failed to prevent.
For these cases I will use the same example within Assembly Planner:
I have assembly SS09200 and am replacing OpSeq# 20 item 606525 with 607115.
Case #1 (older logic), I have set effective dates to replace the item as of 8/19/2020 as my best guess on when it will become effective.
I then run a report on the part that will show me when the old item (606525) will be in ‘shortage’ status. Meaning we no longer have any in inventory.
As shown in our ‘Part Shortage Report,’ I will run out on 8/18 after I have built three units. There are a few ways to handle this.
Case #1: I either need to make a manual note on those 8/18 units to use the new part, or I need to find a few more to inventory by the time they are required to finish out the manufacturing day. This is obviously prone to error and would likely result in setting the start date of the new part to 8/18/2020, scrapping three of the old item 606525.
Case #2 (unit serial break), I have set Unit Serial Start and End to replace the item as of VIN010 based on the knowledge I have from inventory being fed into the ‘Shortage Report.’ This allows us to pick and consume the part based on the sequence of units and do a part change in the middle of the day.
This also allows us to set the breakpoint and not worry about whether the line is getting a bit ahead or behind schedule. For example, if you run into issues and run slower than normal, it's possible that some of the units that still require 606525 could get pushed to 8/19. Using a date could cause issues and confusion, but if the breakpoint is a unit, it automatically shifts as shown below.
Notice that Vin004, based on production issues, has been pushed to the first unit on 8/18 and as a result, Vin009 is pushed to 8/19. While using unit breaks, this requires no changes by the engineers to pick the correct parts or send the right instructions.
There are a few considerations when using Unit based filtering. The first and most important is that the build list needs to be carefully managed and understood across different departments. Any units being moved within the build list or removed need to be communicated across the business.
Depending on the scope of the Assembly Planner implementation, our tools may or may not be able to generate notifications of changes to the relevant people. The second is that there may be different sequences on different lines for the same unit. In this case, Unit-based filtering may cause more problems than it solves. However, it is our belief that as we continue to expand our capabilities, this will become a more dominant and robust way to introduce changes to a production line.
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