The Material Requirements Planning (MRP) feature in Autodesk Fusion Operations has the main objective of showing the supply and demand for a given date interval, for the different products. It allows you to see, not only, the different material needs - to be produced or purchased - but also the expected stock on each date.

This feature calculates demand and supply from the current day onwards. If you want to see historical data related to production, sales or purchases, you can check the Reports for production, sales and purchase orders.

Short context overview of the setup

In order to further explain the filtering options, we created a setup from a company that sells cakes.

We have received orders for 800 strawberry, chocolate and orange cakes between October 15 and November 9, and want to plan their material requirements to fulfill these orders.

We need to know what materials we have in stock, and what materials will be received from Purchase Orders, so we can plan our needs and create additional Purchase Orders if needed.

In case we need to use intermediate products which are manufactured internally, we can also add those via Production Orders, so the MRP calculation takes them into account.

Description of fields and tables

With this feature, you will find a table in which the lines represent the products and the columns the dates starting from today (current day of the production).

For each line, i.e. for each product, you can find the following information:

Where:

In stock - Stock at the start of the day/week, for the specified date,

Supply - Amount being produced or being received via purchase orders,

Demand - Quantity requested via your orders from clients,

Internal demand - Demand generated by your own production orders (BoM - Bill of Materials)

Need/Excess - Stock at the end of the day/week and quantity to be transferred to the “In stock” value of the following day/week. If the quantity is positive it will be displayed in green, if negative displayed in red.

If you have the Need/Excess field in red, you can click on it and create a Purchase Order to meet that Need.

The “Last refresh at: ...” field, below the table filters, shows the last time the Material Requirements Plan has been updated. Every time you change the filters, you must tap on "Calculate MRP" to update the values.

Table filters vs MRP Data

There are two different filter types in our Material Requirements Planning feature:

1. Table filters, on the left: you can filter the products that you are seeing. This will reduce the number of lines shown below.

See what happens when you filter for the production order Chocolate Cake 1, we had 13 lines in the MRP and now we only have 7:

2. MRP Data, on the right: you can choose which data should be considered by the MRP when calculating the demand and the supply values - this will change the considered values for supply and demand for the MRP.

In the MRP data you can also change the time scale to get a daily, weekly or monthly view of your Material Requirements Plan.

See below what happens when we filter for the production order Chocolate Cake 1, both in Demand and Supply:

You can also mix both Table Filters and MRP Data: If you only want to see the expected stock for a set of products, you can use the Table Filters to narrow down your results. Additionally, if you want to check the demand generated by a set of production orders, you should filter those in MRP Data and uncheck the boxes for “Supply”. Therefore, you can specify from which sales orders, production orders, and forecasts the demand comes from.

Exporting data

When you have finished setting up your Material Requirements Plan with the filters you want, you can download an Excel Export with that information just by clicking on the button that’s on the top right side of the plan.

Frequently asked questions:

1. Will the Need/Excess value consider the individual values for each day?

When using a weekly view, the Need/Excess value will not consider the individual values for each day, but the value at the end of the week. This must be taken into consideration, and the need/excess values for each particular day should be monitored, to ensure that you don’t run out of stock. The same applies when using a monthly view.

2. Does the MRP considers sales orders for internal demand?

For MRP calculations, the Bill of Materials from sales orders is not considered for the internal demand, as it only becomes a need once you schedule your production, not when planning it.

3. Does the system consider all purchase orders for the supply?

The system considers only open purchase orders for supply calculations. Moreover, it excludes the quantity that has been delivered. For example, if 5000 units were ordered and 2000 were received, the supply field will display 3000.

4. Why can't I see the raw materials needed for some production orders in the MRP?

If the start date of the production order is in the past the raw materials needs will not be shown.

If you have any questions regarding Material Requirements, don’t hesitate to contact us through our Live Chat or by reaching out to your account manager.

Need help? Request a Fusion Operations expert to contact you here.