There isn’t a lot to this one, the help covers what it can and can’t do.  That is, there really is no system response, it is a notification to take action.  If you don’t take action manually, the order will still be late.

Usage

Use this window to view the shop orders that will have material availability problems if you do not reschedule. When a shop order is created or its quantity and/or need date is changed or if it is released, an availability check is run to ensure that no shortages will occur when manufacturing starts. Only the components which have the Availability Check check box selected in the Misc Part Info tab of the Inventory Part window are considered. The planner must check this before releasing the shop order and then reschedule, if necessary, to prevent a shortage.

A planning alert can be either low or high priority, depending on the shop order's status. The alert for a shop order component line is automatically deleted when it is completely issued. If a shop order with a planning alert is canceled, the alert is automatically deleted. In addition to material shortages, planning alerts will be generated when the required date of a material is past due and material is not fully issued.

Now separately, there is an Inventory Part Availability Exceptions function that I find is much more useful.  I would setup the job to run that update, then view the output.  I push planners to this function because it is applies to both purchase and manufactured items, whereas Planning Alerts is Manufactured Only items.

Find this Activity diagram in the help and go through all the steps and details, it is pretty decent for explanation.

I try to explain (shortly) two other ways of generating Planning Alerts for shop order components which I think could be useful in some cases. However, bear in mind that the logic behind Planing Alerts are same as when entering customer order lines - it uses the “Availability Check logic”.  “Availability Check “ logic monitors available balance within the component expected lead time. Outside this lead time, system thinks shortages can be solved so you don’t get any warnings for orders far out in the future.

The essence of the availability check is: check if the new demand can be entered without preventing other orders to be delivered according to plan.

So a bit more complex then just looking at Projected Onhand.

Okay the two ways I mentioned….

1 - Selectecting a set of Planned Shop Orders from the Shop Orders screen and run the command; Material Planning => Run Availability Check

Actually when running this function system considers all components, not just the shop order components which have Availabilty Check enabled.

So this answers the question “Can I realease these planned shop orders without creating problems for other released shop orders?" (the function does not consider machine/labor capacity)

Please note that there exists a column called Planning Alerts Exists in the shop orders screen, this can be useful when searching for potentential problem orders.

2 - Regenerate the Planning Alerts from scratch - run the job Calculate Planning Alerts for Site - I mean who wants to read yesterdays paper?

If there are changes in the supply side, Planning Alerts are not automatically regenerated, therefore above job could be good to run.

The job starts with filtering out shop order component lines in state Released, Reserved and Issued where remaining to reserve is greater than zero. It does so for components where the Availability Check is ticked, in the Inventory Part, Misc Part Info tab. It processes the lines sorted by date required (very important). It runs the available check logic for “these guys”. Then, finally, it processes the Planned Shop Order component lines.

So you can say that this is similar to release the lines one by one, sorted by date required.

Oboy - quite a lot of information to digest. Well, good luck with your shop order material planning.

-Mats

I am new to IFS, so if I highlight shop floor orders in planned status from the shop orders session, the planning alerts will give me all of the shortages for those shop orders? I could then download into excel and vlookup open PO lines to see when they will be replenished. Then I can schedule shop orders accordingly due to material availability? Will the planning alerts give me all shortages or just the ones where the material isn’t arriving in time? I would like to see all shortages and supply for all of my shop orders on one report, is there such a session in IFS?
Thanks