Lot Accumulation Period vs Rescheduling Period for Dynamics NAV Manufacturing

Overview
With the release of Dynamcis NAV 2013 and NAV 2013 R2 (Navision 7.0 and 7.1 respectively), there has been a few improvements in the existing functionality. One of the more notable ones that I’ve been meaning to write about is the enhancement to how NAV create the planning worksheet.

Ordering for Manufacturing
Most manufacturing companies will plan what they want to make within a period. How long that period is will be determined by the company running the plan. Speak to any manufacturer and they will tell you that they are a Make-To-Order manufacturing company. This means they don’t, or at least intend to, make any items if there are no existing demand for the item.

Typically, the Reordering Policy for these types of companies will be set to Lot for Lot. Meaning that when MPS and MRP plan is ran, it will look to consolidate orders within the period and make the most efficient production order(s) and purchase orders to satisfy the demand.

The Old
In the versions prior to Navision 8.0, you only had the Reorder Cycle. So if the demand does not satisfy the 2 weeks supply, it’ll just tell you to cancel the order and create the new order for the new demand requirement. Well, if you stay in any manufacturing environment long enough, you’ll know that it’s some times impossible to change what’s already scheduled or released to the shop floor.

Using one field is fine if your aggregation period is the same as your tolerance for rescheduling, but that’s not typically the case.

The New
In Dynamics NAV 2013, they split the Reorder Cycle into 2 different fields. Lot Accumulation Period and Rescheduling Period.

The Lot Accumulation Period replaces the Reorder cycle in that it will aggregate demand for the 2 weeks out from the time you run your plans. The Rescheduling Period basically looks at the orders created during these 2 period, and if there are any changes in the demand or supply, instead of asking you to cancel the production/purchase order, it’ll ask you to reschedule it.

Conclusion
This may not seem much of a big deal, but when I first saw this, I was incredibly happy. For a long time, users had to deal with suggestions on canceling and creating new. So instead of carrying out these action messages, the users basically ignored these advices.

Finally Microsoft did this. Now if we can get more of our requests done in the next release, everyone will be even happier.