MRP never creates Shop Orders but only Shop Order Requisitions (proposed Shop Orders). However, maybe you have connected a Process Type to the part which automatically converts the requisitions into orders?

Furthermore, a shop order requisition may be generated to cover multiple different demands. Could be demands from several different customer orders or other demands (including safety stock). So there’s not a 1-1 connection between a shop order and a customer order if you use MRP. MRP will simply make sure you supply the stock with enough quantity to fulfil your demands.

You can however manually “peg” a shop order to a specific customer order line from the page Manual Pegging of Customer Order Line. Then the pegged quantity will be automatically reserved to the customer order line once received. Since it is possible to peg a shop order to several customer order lines, the customer order number is not visible on the shop order in such case, but on the page called Pegged Manufactured Customer Order Lines.

If you want to always create shop orders pegged to a customer order line (make-to-order), you should consider creating shop orders using DOP (Dynamic Order Processing) instead of MRP.

We added a custom field to the Shop Order whereby we can soft (rather than the hard manual pegging above) peg an order by just updating the Customer Order number to the shop order.

There isn’t a mechanism to do this from the output of MRP as was described because they are not necessarily 1 to 1.  A planner has to come along and evaluate based on dates which shop order goes to which customer order.

DOP ties everything together automatically, but it is very rigid unless you always only ever create the one shop order for that demand and never really do anything as a shop order to stock.  If you want to move things around or move orders up or swap parts from one customer order to another due to a change in priority, DOP becomes very hard to use.  It suits a purpose, but you need to know the method in which you are operating.

We have decided to add a custom field to the Shop Order header to allow the user to manually enter a Customer Number.

My next question is, is it possible to add a custom “F8 List of values” to that custom field, so the user can select from a list, rather than relying on knowledge of the customer numbers?

Appologies if this is a basic question, but I’m fairly new to IFS Apps 10 and still finding my feet!

No apologies here, this is all for learning, no matter what level of experience you are.

Yes, it is possible to make the field a reference field so it can only be used to select a valid customer order.  We chose to make ours a free form text field because it is also used for other sources of demand than just the customer order.

It is just the setup of the custom field that determines it

Thank you for the information about the “reference field”.

Unfortunately we are on UPD12 and when attempting to create the custom field I receive an error which is documented at the link below.

We are due to receive UPD17 very soon so hopefully it will fix this issue.

For now I will use the free form text field as advised in your reply.