Time Fence Control
Time fence control is a policy or guideline you establish to note where various restrictions or changes in operating procedures take place. For example, you can easily change the master production schedule for an item beyond its cumulative lead time with little effect on related material and capacity plans. However, changes inside the cumulative lead time cause increasing difficulty, reaching a point where you should resist such changes because of their effect on other plans. You can use time fences to define these points of policy change. Oracle Master Scheduling/MRP and Supply Chain Planning offers three types of time fences:
You can determine whether to consider the time fence when planning a material plan or a master schedule if you select Yes for Demand or Planning Time Fence Control on the Plan Options window, or (for the Release Time Fence) if you check Production on the DRP, MPS or MRP Names window. If you are using either the planning, demand, or release time fence, the planning process looks at the item attributes for each item in the Master Item window to determine the selected time fence for each item. The three time fences are calculated by adding one of the following to the plan date (or the next valid workday, if the plan was run on an invalid workday): total lead time, cumulative manufacturing lead time, cumulative total lead time or a user-defined time fence.
Planning Time Fence
For discrete items, you can recommend that an order be rescheduled out or cancelled, but cannot recommend reschedule in messages or create new planned orders within the planning time fence for an item. For repetitive items, you can limit the changes Oracle Master Scheduling/MRP and Supply Chain Planning can recommend within the planning time fence by the acceptable rate increase or decrease.
The planning time fence does not apply to purchase requisitions or internal requisitions.
Demand Time Fence
If you specify demand time fence control when launching the planning process, the planning process only considers actual demand within the demand time fence specified for an item (i.e., forecasted demand is not considered).
Release Time Fence
If you define a release time fence attribute for your item, and you specify release time fence control when defining a DRP, MPS or MRP name, you can automatically release planned orders as WIP jobs. Planned orders for purchased items are released as purchase requisitions. The planned orders must meet the following auto-release criteria:
- new due date within the auto-release time fence
- must not have compressed lead time
- must be for standard items (the planning process will not automatically release models, option classes, and planning items)
- the orders are not for Kanban items
- the release time fence option is defined as anything other than Do not auto-release, Do not release (Kanban), or Null
Auto-release for WIP jobs is not applicable for repetitively planned items. No material availability check is performed before WIP jobs are released.
See Also
Repetitive Planning
Time Fence Planning
MPS/MRP Planning Attribute Group
Defining Items
