Manufacturing orders: How to persist progress?

[lutuh]

Frepple 9.9.0 Community Edition

Helly everybody,

first, a big THANK YOU for this great product! I spent quite some time evaluating the Community version for the needs of our small metal production company and thanks to the excellent documentation, got a good grasp about the multitude of options that Frepple offers in terms of production planning.

There is one thing that I am not yet able to understand, though. I've searched the GitHub discussions as well as the Google group and extensively asked the AI about it, without results.

So I have a production plan based on a certain number of sales orders.

• Now, new sales orders come in and are added to Freeple.
• At the same time, some proposed manufacturing orders are being completed.

Upon creation of the new plan, I struggle to find a way to persist the progress made on the manufacturing orders (MOs). From the docs (https://frepple.com/docs/current/model-reference/manufacturing-orders.php) I understand that the status should be set to confirmed and quantity_completed should be set to the already completed quantity.

Surely the confirmed MOs persist after the creation of the new plan along with the already completed quantity, but they lose their assigned demands. Thus, an identical new MO is created for each confirmed MO, having the demand assigned. On the confirmed MOs the demand is empty.

I guess I am misunderstanding the general way of how to use Frepple in an ongoing production process. I want to add new sales orders, create a new plan, but not lose progress on the MOs already completed. If the described behavior seems like a bug, I am happy to provide data exports and/or screenshots.

Thanks
Lucas

[jdetaeye]

At a high level:
Frepple is designed to be a planning tool. It's NOT a replacement for an ERP or MES system for machine operators to report the progress on manufacturing orders.
In the enterprise and cloud editions there is shopfloor app that handles such progress tracking, but it still pretty basic.

On your specific questions:

Surely the confirmed MOs persist after the creation of the new plan along with the already completed quantity, but they lose their assigned demands.

The link between a manufacturing order and a sales order is dynamically comuted by frepple. An MO that is linked with sales order X in today's plan, can be linked to a completely different sales order Y in tomorrow's plan. We use an FIFO material pegging logic for all materials, and rush orders, MO timing, sales order priorities, changes to sales order due dates, ... all can result in a different outcome of the material pegging.
(You can use the make-to-order feature to maintain hard associations between manufacturing orders and sales orders, but that's a different topic)

Thus, an identical new MO is created for each confirmed MO, having the demand assigned. On the confirmed MOs the demand is empty.

That is not correct.
MO in the status "confirmed" produce material like all other MOs, and use the same FIFO logic to associate them with demands.
Also MO in the status "completed" still produce material.
MO in the status "closed" no longer produce material. If the buffer onhand hasn't been increased with the produced quantiy, the frepple will see a material shortage and propose a new MO.

[lutuh]

Hello Johan,

thank you very much for the prompt reply! I will use the weekend to meditate over your reply (and re-read https://frepple.com/docs/current/examples/buffer/make-to-order.php).

Thank you!
Lucas

[lutuh]

Hello Johan,

thank you again very much for helping me out. The solution to my problem is simply that I did properly understand the concept of "buffers" until now.
So all I need to do in order to persist the production progress is to create buffers, each one corresponding to a completed manufacturing order. Sounds so simple, but I managed to overlook it.

Thank you and have a good week!
Lucas