Does "Constrained Material" actual work as advertised?

I am exploring the various configurations related to Job Planning automation. Among other things, our objective is to be able to identify:

  • Jobs that can be firmed and released because there are no material shortages
  • Of the Jobs that cannot be released on time, what are the gating items?

I’ve got some external queries that provide this information and are very accurate. However, they require generating temp tables, which obviously are not “live”, so I’m investigating Epicor tools that will provide the same information within the Epicor application.

Based on my readings, “Constrained Materials” should, at the very least, show me jobs that can be started on time based on material availability, and those which cannot. However, this does not appear to be the case.

There are a number of jobs, all with constrained materials = true, which have accurate Purchasing Lead Times and accurate open PO due dates (i.e. not past due) that show they can start tomorrow even though they have material shortages.

Some jobs are scheduled exactly as expected, with a start date = to today’s date + purchasing lead time for material shortages, but many do not.

What is everyone’s experience with this?


Todd Gilbert
DC Electronics, Inc.

Todd, we are investigating constrained materials also. I looks like it comes into play during the job scheduling, looks at availability and the add the material lead time into the job scheduling process. so you may have the materials for operation 10 and the schedules as you expect, but then operation 20 does not have a material available and if it is marked constrained then that operation will not start until after the material arrives. This causes a gap between the operations is seems.

To find jobs that can be scheduled with full material availability we are starting to use the Fulfillment Workbench (we are in a make to stock mode). on that workbench use the job fulfillment tab to find the next week of jobs to review and then workbench will calculate the material availability. only schedule the jobs with 100% materials available.