Manufacturing/Supply Chain Enhancements

QAD Enterprise Edition 2017 provides additional support for the concept of a milk run approach to supplier deliveries. In a milk run, your own vehicles or vehicles belonging to a logistics provider follow a prescribed route to one or more suppliers, which is described on a pickup sheet. The vehicles pick up parts or materials and deliver them to your manufacturing sites.

Enhancements have been made in several areas.

This release adds load optimization logic to help alleviate a major challenge of milk runs: sending multiple partially loaded vehicles. During automatic or manual pickup sheet creation, you can select a rule to control full-truck optimization logic to utilize excess capacity:

• Linear Rule. The system proportionately distributes the remaining open capacity among the PO lines of the pickup sheets in order to maximize the overall capacity, in weight or volume.

• ABC Rule. This rule program is provided mainly as a sample to be used for your own custom programming. If you use it as-is, the system proportionately distributes the open capacity over all of the items with the same ABC classification code. If this process still leaves open capacity, the system uses open capacity for items with the next-lower ABC classification.

You can now include discrete PO lines on pickup sheets. Discrete lines and supplier scheduled order lines can be mixed on the same sheet.

Note: Discrete PO lines are excluded from system full-truck optimization calculations; typically, PO line quantities are fixed when the PO is issued and can only be modified by the buyer.

Order lines on pickup sheets can now include containers, defined using the features of the Packaging Setup Menu (13.14).

Packing setup functions let you define all types of containers (packs) as well as create packaging structures (bills of packaging). Containers can be single-level, such as items in a box, or multi-level, such as items in a box and boxes on a pallet. Setup supports multi-level containers, as well as containers that have many pieces—a tote with lid and inserts, for example. Because container weights and volumes are included, you can ensure that capacity calculations are a valid representation of the load.

Pickup sheets show containers so that the logistics transporter can verify the number of containers in the delivery.

Pallet capacity information has been added to maintenance programs and report outputs. This information helps the logistics planner determine how close to a full truck a pickup sheet is in terms of pallets/containerization.

Three new optional fields have been added to Supplier Network Maintenance.

• Pickup Start Time and Pickup End Time allow the planner to specify a pickup “window” for the logistics provider to be at the supplier for pickup.

• Supplier Dock field allows the planner to specify a supplier dock identifier—sometimes referred to as a “bay” or “gate”—where the logistics provider is expected to arrive. It further qualifies the location at the supplier’s facility.

The information helps logistics planners and transportation drivers more effectively manage the arrival and pickup of material. It also allows the suppliers to more effectively plan for the arrival of trucks at their facilities.

You can now specify the planner responsible for a supplier network in Supplier Network Maintenance. Additionally, Planner has been added to the selection criteria in the following functions, allowing you to control record selection based on the associated planner:

Logistics planners can now assign a generated pickup sheet to an alternate network/route. This supports a business model that requires multiple deliveries per day and lets the planner choose a network that matches the suppliers on the pickup sheet.

Note: This feature is only available in Pickup Sheet Maintenance—not Pickup Sheet Auto Create. Additionally, the Network ID can only be changed when the sheet status is Draft.