Master Planner and the use of Standard Lead Time for PO Receipt (SLTPO).

We are going to use MP Item, which has an item type of “Item” and an Standard Lead time for Purchase Orders (SLTPO) of 10. This means the MP Item takes 10 business days to come in.

Initially, we assigned a coverage code of “requirement” to it, and entered a demand for quantity-100, for the date of 2/29, which is 10 days in the future.

Now, when we run Master Planner, the results are as follows:

Master Planner backs off the due date by the SLTPO (10) and generates a suggestion for the PO to be placed on 2/19, allowing for 10 days to be received.

Notice, that there is no entry in the “Vendor” field for this item.  That is because we did not fill out the “Default Vendor” field on the item master.  Let’s do that now and rerun Master Planner.

Now select the button entitled “Create PO”, Ascent will create a purchase order for this item.  Since there are no other items that have this default vendor, the PO will only have this one item on it.

 Now, let’s look at PO-00951, which by selecting that PO on this screen, will appear.

The order creation date is today, the order date is 2/19, and the due date is 2/29.

  Now, let’s create another item, MP Item-2, except let’s give it a 15 day SLTPO and put in a SO demand due date of 3/20.  Also, use the same default vendor as the item MP Item, delete the PO-00951 from the previous run of Master Planner, and then run Master Planner: 

Master Planner appropriately suggests purchase orders for the two items in question.  However, they are for the same vendor.  Assuming you select “Create PO” for one of those items, a single PO will be created for BOTH items, since they have a common default vendor.

 For this example,  select Create PO on one of those items, and see what Master Planner does:

 It brought us to the next screen in the Master Planner sequence, and showed us what PO it created, PO-00952, with an order date of 2/19/2016.  If we click the PO-00952 we see this:

Both lines are on the same PO.  The PO has a due date equal to the first requirement (2/29). 

You could always change the due date of the MP Item-2 line on the PO to be 3/15, and then if you view the PO, you would see:

Note: there were no trade agreements for these items and no cost, therefore, no PO price.

 Lastly, let’s take a situation where the due date minus the SLTPO in an arithmetic calculation is prior to today.  With a due date of 2/15 and an SLTPO of 15 days, let’s see what Master Planner suggests for MP Item-2.

It will still back off the due date by the SLTPO, and will suggest a PO with a PO date of 1/31 and a due date of 2/15, to meet the requirement.  Obviously, since for this example, today’s date is 2/9, so it would be up to the planner to adjust the PO that was created (assuming you select Create PO) to reasonable dates.