“Friday’s child is loving and giving”

This week we were asked to advise a production scheduler in a manufacturing plant who wanted to schedule ‘make-to-order’ production for specific customers for specific days.

Rather than look at how we do this in production scheduling we suggested the use of a Receipt calendar attached to the customer.

Here’s how this goes. We need a calendar, and to simplify the definition of the ‘Open’ working days we’ll setup a Working time template. We’ll create a new Working time template – and with a singular lack of imagination we’ll call it ‘Friday’. Organisation administration > Common > Calendars > Working time templates:

We only need to setup the working times on the Friday tab – we can leave all of the other tabs blank:

The From / To times aren’t very important – but we must leave the ‘Closed for pickup’ flag blank.

Next we’ll create our calendar – and again we’ll call it Friday. Organisation administration > Common > Calendars > Calendars:

Click on the ‘Working times’ button, and then click on the ‘Compose working times’ button. The calendar name is pre-selected. Enter From date and To date and enter/choose the Working time template created above:

When you click OK the system populates the calendar’s working time table according to the template:

As you can see Friday is the only working day in each week. Obviously you now need to tidy this calendar up by closing off public holidays and shutdown periods.

Now we’re ready to assign this calendar to a customer. Sales and marketing > Common > customers > All customers > Edit. You’ll find the Receipt calendar in the ‘Invoicing and delivery’ fast tab:

Now, before we create a sales order, we’re going to constrain those nice folk in Customer Services by setting ‘Delivery date control’. The company wide default for this setting is in the Accounts receivable parameters. Accounts receivable > Setup > Accounts receivable parameters:

As you can see, our options for Delivery date control are: ‘None’; ‘Sales lead time’; ‘ATP’ – Available to promise; and ‘CTP’ – Capable to promise.

These company-wide defaults can be over-ridded on an item-by item basis in the Default order settings, and Site specific order settings found on the Released products form.

For now we’ll assume Sales lead time delivery date control with a sales lead time of 5 days. It’s midnight on Tuesday 3^rd November (no, I’m not working late, I’m on vacation in another time zone). Back on the customer form, let’s create a sales order:

Even before we’ve added an item we can see that the Requested ship date has been set to Friday 13^th November. The sales lead time has taken us past this Friday, so the system’s offering us next Friday.

If we click on the ‘Simulate delivery dates’ button the system only offers us the open days in the customer’s Receipt calendar:

But we have to note that we’ve constrained the Receipt date, but we’re going to schedule against the Ship date, so one other thing you may want to do here is to setup a Transport calendar. The Transport calendar defines the lead time between the sales order line requested or confirmed ship date and the requested or confirmed receipt date. Inventory management > Setup > Distribution > Transport:

You define a Shipping point ‘From’ warehouse – and a Receiving point. The Receiving point is either a Warehouse or an Address. If the Receiving point is a warehouse you’re defining a warehouse-warehouse lead time which is used by Master planning when it’s creating planned transfer orders; if your Receiving point is an Address you’re defining the lead time we mentioned above (ship date to receipt date). In the demo data, Cave Wholesale’s delivery address is in Georgia and this gives us a Transport days of 3 days (regardless of Mode of delivery):

Now add warehouse 13 to customer as a default and create a new sales order and you get:

Looks like we should have called our Receipt calendar ‘Tuesday’ – full of grace.