Designing, Selecting, Implementing and Using APS Systems by Vincent C. S. Wiers & A. (Ton) G. de Kok

Author:Vincent C. S. Wiers & A. (Ton) G. de Kok
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

4.2.2.2 Routes and Recipes

A route, or recipe, indicates how a product is made by means of specifying a set of resources and a sequence. Routes and recipes are master data needed for different purposes, and from that perspective they should ideally be managed in the ERP system. However, some ERP systems do not contain very well-maintained route information. This might not solely be caused by a functional deficiency but also by users not updating information. However, ERP systems are typically not very user friendly in updating routing information, and the models used in ERP might not be suitable to store the routing information efficiently.For example, ERP systems typically have a resource group/resource structure. When the route is specified on a resource group level, all resources within the group are assumed to be equally capable of carrying out the operation. In practice, this is often not the case. ERP experts might argue that by using alternative routes or recipes (sometimes called production versions), they can model all possible routes. Theoretically this is true, but this would be a very inefficient and time-consuming way to store alternative routes. When, say, of the 10 operations, there are 5 alternatives on step 3 that cannot be described using a resource group/resource structure, because the resource group contains 10 resources, and for this product only 5 of them are an alternative, 5 routes with 10 operations each, so 50 operations would have to be entered in the ERP for the one particular product only. When there are 20 similar products with small deviations in allowed resources, the number of production versions quickly explodes. Whereas in an APS for scheduling, typically logic is modeled such as “Resource 3a can deal with widths between 500 and 750,” and then based on the operation dimensions, the APS would derive the alternative resources for this operation, which are the 5 out of the 10 that can process the width.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.