Overview of Work Order Material Availability

As a maintenance manager, you can ensure all materials are available for a work order prior to its release to the shop floor. As priorities change, you can execute work orders of lower priority that now have become a high priority. When materials are scarce, you can decide which work orders you can release, and which work orders you must place on hold until materials become available.

To gain visibility into material availability for work orders, you can:

Recommend a list of work orders for material prioritization to be released, based on a combination of various attributes such as item and date criteria.
Reassign available materials to work orders with higher priority when shortages exist.
Release or hold work orders based on material availability and shortages to minimize shop floor disruptions.

You can define material availability rules that are used by the application to create an initial recommendation based on which work orders should be released when materials are scarce. The set of rules can be defined at an organization level to list work orders for material prioritization based on the these sorting and filtering criteria:

List work orders in the order of material assignment priority based on critical items and work order start date.
Include work orders within a specified time fence and having specific statuses, types, and subtypes.
Include work orders with specific materials, or materials based on attributes such as make versus buy, and supply type.
Exclude work orders from material de-prioritization based on specific attributes of the item, and work order.

Once rules are created, use the Manage Availability Assignments workbench to:

Review the prioritized list of work orders and the material assigned to the work orders to identify the material availability and shortages as calculated by the material availability rules.
Review materials with shortages and affected work orders and expected supplies to address the material shortages.
This helps you to decide whether to release a work order or to unrelease a released work order.
Adjust material assignments for work order prioritization and preview the force assigned and unassigned work orders.
Adjust material assignments for work order prioritization and preview the force assigned and unassigned work orders.

To start using the workbench, you click Calculate Material Availability to initiate the background process, at the completion of which the workbench will refresh. Then, you can view and assess the assignment priority sequence for each result row by work order and item. Next, you can view the material availability details, including the expected supplies. You can then change the priority of work orders by clicking the icon under the Change Assignment column. Clicking the force assigning or force unassigning icon will change the materials based on expected supplies. Finally, you can release or hold work orders after you're satisfied with your changes.

For more details on material availability, see the Work Order Material Availability section in the Using Manufacturing guide.