Command Centre
Buying Office
The Buying Office in Merlin MRP 2000 is a busy place! Here you will find three distinctly different ways of purchasing materials, and this in addition to the Buy Kit option available at Job level in Shop Floor.
You can inspect your existing Purchase Orders by clicking the command button at the top of the Interactive column.
At the top of the Reports column you will see Proposed Main Buy and Run Main Buy. Clearly, it is a good idea to run the proposed list first, to perform a sanity check before committing the purchases.
This routine can be run at any time to generate Purchase Orders that will procure all the materials you need at any given time to replenish stock items which have fallen below the Minimum Stock level and restore them to Maximum Stock Levels, after all Allocated materials and goods already on-order are taken into account.
This forms the kernel of your basic stock control system, but is only one of the tools which Merlin places at your disposal (including Run MRP (QuarterMaster) described below) for making sure you have the materials you need, when you need them. It is important to have an overall strategy for using these tools, so please see Stock Control Options at the foot of this page.
At the bottom of the Interactive column you will see Run MRP. This will invoke the immensely powerful QuarterMaster module which will scan optionally either a nominated Job Series (buying group) or All Unprocessed Jobs on the system, drilling down to find all of the subassemblies infinite levels deep, provide an option of reports scheduling subassembly needs, showing what is in already production and what needs to be built, and warning of any impossible deadlines.
QuarterMaster will then offer to generate Works Orders for all subassembly shortages, and Auto-Create Jobs to satisfy the requirement. Auto-Created Jobs are "Authorised" so no manual intervention is necessary.
Once you have started this process, you should see it through to completion.
Then, QuarterMaster will proceed to analyse all of the materials requirements for all of these jobs, again offering comprehensive reports breaking-down the requirements job by job and part by part, warning of impossible deadlines. It will then generate purchase orders to procure these materials, and produce Delivery Schedules for your suppliers, rewriting the Schedules table.
Please Note: In both of the above purchasing routines, items with Stop Purchase checked on the Stock Record Card or the appropriate Supplier Record Card will be shown in the Proposed Purchases clearly marked with STOP!, but will not be included in the Purchase Orders.
Shopping List is the third method of raising Purchase Orders in Buying Office. This is a very fast means of making ad hoc purchases by manually setting a Shopping List purchase quantity against each item you wish to purchase in this way. (This can also be done on the Stock Record Card.) You can inspect your Shopping List at any time by clicking the appropriate tab, and clicking the Print button will generate the Proposed Shopping List and generate the Purchase Orders.
Shopping List shows when a supplier or material is Stopped, but ignores this when generating the Purchase Orders.
[Shopping List] [Delivery Schedules] [Goods In] [Rejected Items] [Run MRP] [Stock Control Options]
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