Defining Work Order Material Availability Rules: Worked Example

You're a production supervisor who wants to ensure that work orders of higher priority are released to the shop floor. Create a set of rules based on which materials are assigned to the various work orders. This example shows how you can perform the Materials Availability Rules task to set up the assignment criteria based on which materials are calculated and assigned to work orders.

Consider the following scenario where you're using the Material Availability Rules task to define the rules and create a material assignment for your manufacturing organization.

The following table summarizes key decisions and corresponding tasks for this scenario:

Decisions to Consider	Task to Perform
How do you sort work orders based on their priority?	Set up the rule sequence for various work order attributes in the Work Order Assignment Priority tab.
How do you decide which work orders and materials will be used to plan for material assignment?	Create an inclusion criteria for work orders and work order components in the Inclusion Criteria tab.
How do you select certain work orders for which you can't deprioritize material availability calculations?	Adjust the assignment criteria by defining work order attributes in the Forced Assignment Criteria tab, which ensures that materials can't be unassigned for those work orders in case of force assignment.

Note: You can perform these tasks in any order. You can also choose to perform either one or two. In such a case, a default priority sequence will be assigned by the application considering only the parameters you have selected.

Material Availability Rules: Work Order Assignment Priority

1. In the Material Availability Rules: Work Order Assignment Priority tab, set up the following attributes with the applicable rule sequence:

   This is a table that lists all the values of attributes and the corresponding rule sequences.

   Attribute	Attribute Value	Sort Order	Rule Sequence	Consideration
   Item	AB1	Not applicable	10	All work order operations that use the Item AB1 would fall in this category. This rule sequence gets a priority of 1. Work orders that don't use this item will follow in the assignment priority sequence based on the other rule sequence values defined by you.
   Planned Completion Date	Not applicable	Ascending	20	All work orders will be sorted in an ascending order based on the planned completion date from the current date. This rule sequence will get a priority of 2.
   Planned Start Date	Not applicable	Descending	30	All work orders will be sorted in an descending order based on the planned start date from the current date. This rule sequence will get a priority of 3.
   Work Order Type	Standard	Not applicable	40	All standard work orders will fall in this category. This rule sequence gets a priority of 4. Work orders that are nonstandard, rework, or transform will follow in the assignment priority sequence based on the other rule sequence values defined by you.

   Note: If you don't define any assignment sequence, a default assignment priority sequence will be applied. The default assignment sequence is based on ascending order of work order planned completion date first, and planned start date next.

2. Click Save and select the tab Inclusion Criteria.

Material Availability Rules: Inclusion Criteria

1. On the Inclusion Criteria tab, specify the following values as described in the following table.

   This is a table that specifies values for some of the parameters in the Inclusion Criteria tab.

   Parameter	Value	Consideration
   Time Span	24	You want to plan for material availability only for work orders which will be completed in 24 hours as calculated from the current time.
   Work Order Status	Released, Unreleased	You want to plan for material availability only for work orders which are currently in Released or Unreleased status (includes predefined and user-defined).
   Build in WIP Items	Yes	You want to include in the material availability calculations those component items that are internally manufactured.

2. Click Add in the Excluded Components section to specify component items which you don't want to include in the material availability calculations.

   You can exclude certain component items from material availability calculations by specifying the item name and item category of those component items. You can do this for certain component items that are noncritical in the manufacturing of a final assembly, or for items that are in abundance in inventory.

   Note: The Item Category list of values displays all categories of the catalog assigned to an item in the Inventory work area.

3. Click Save and select the tab Forced Assignment Criteria.

Material Availability Rules: Forced Assignment Criteria

1. Click Add in the Forced Assignment Criteria tab to exclude certain work orders from being lowered in priority on manual adjustment of the material assignment of other work orders.

   For example, if a work order WO123 is reserved against sales orders for a customer of high priority, you can specify the customer name in this tab and ensure that materials used to fulfill this work order aren't distributed to other work orders, even though they might have a higher priority based on the assignment sequence and inclusion criteria.

   This is a table that provides certain attribute values that you can specify to create a criteria to exclude work orders from being lowered in priority.

   Attribute	Attribute Value	Consideration
   Customer	ABC	All work orders reserved against sales orders for this customer will be excluded from being lowered in priority on manual adjustment of materials.
   Item Category	Servers	All work orders that use items within the specified item category as their materials will be excluded from being lowered in priority on manual adjustment of materials.

2. Click Save and Close.

   You have successfully defined a set of rules that's used to calculate material availability assignments.