BellHawk Material Planning Option

BellHawk provides a simple to use planning option that will take all the open orders and compute what materials need to be ordered and what needs to be made and when. It does this based on the bills of materials (BOMs) for each of the manufactured products and expected lead times to make or purchase items. It does not take into account resource limitations as this requires the maintenance of complex rules about the performance of people and how to best allocate them to jobs. Instead it uses information already within BellHawk and then does all the "grunt" work of working back from orders through intermediate materials to raw materials using the BOMs and expected lead times. In doing this, it takes account of weekends and holidays when work will not be performed.

BellHawk tracks the status and contents of all the containers in a warehouse or other facility. From this it is able to derive the status of physical inventory in real time. With the BellHawk Material Planning Option, BellHawk will also track allocated inventory. BellHawk tracks:

• Material allocated to jobs

• Material to be produced by Jobs

• Material on order from vendors

• Material allocated to customer orders

It tracks these as time-phased inventory allocation credits and debits. From this it is able to deduce the unallocated inventory that will be available at future times to satisfy the demand for customer orders.

BellHawk then performs its materials planning as follows:

When new customer order arrives, this creates a demand for finished goods. The demand is compared to the unallocated inventory available. If this would cause the amount of unallocated inventory to fall below the safety stock level then BellHawk creates a job to make the finished goods by the customer order wanted date. The materials needed for this job are then determined by the BOM of the finished product. The demand for these materials are then compared with the available unallocated materials and further jobs created or purchase requisitions created to make or buy the needed material. In doing this BellHawk takes into account the number of days of lead time to manufacture or purchase parts. This continues recursively down the BOM until all the necessary jobs and vendor purchase requisitions have been created for the customer order.

For long-lead-time materials, users can also enter sales forecast data and use this to plan the purchasing of raw materials.