It’s essential for an Advanced Planning and Scheduling software to provide flexible and powerful tools for handling multi-level BOMs. After all, this is where scheduling gets complicated and even though MRP systems do a good job letting planners know what material is needed,  they fail to take into account important capacity constraints. Sometimes this shortcoming results in invaluable data (from a scheduling point of view) such as inaccurate required dates and priorities. The fact that with most MRP systems, there is no link between these lower level and higher level work orders (sometimes referred to as child and parent work orders) makes it even harder to produce optimal schedules.

It’s important to have accurate need dates and priorities on work orders of all levels, specially if you want to take full advantage of a rule based optimization engine such as the one in PlanetTogether. (To find out more about PlanetTogether’s optimizer read this blog post by my colleague)

With PlanetTogether, planners have the option to dynamically set the need date, priority and hot flag on child work orders based on the data on (parent) work orders they will be supplying materials to. The optimization engine calculates material requirements and corresponding required dates, then looks for work orders producing these items and makes sure the need date and priorities are set so that the material is ready “just-in-time” for the next work order to use.

Using this feature, or trying it in “What-If” mode is as easy as three check boxes: