I have a scenario where we have a project with a connected customer order line for an assembly (manufactured part). In some cases, the design of the manufactured part will not be final when the customer order line is released and attached to the project activity. Whilst the product structures are ‘tentative’ or maybe the part is not transferred from engineering, MRP will obviously not plan for components further down the structure. However, some of the items may be long lead times and so we need to get these started.

In order to achieve this we thought to manually raise a purchase requisition for long lead items and connect this to the same activity as the customer order line. The thought behind this is that we order the required long lead item, but it is ring-fenced for the correct activity. When the assembly part is designed and structures are made buildable it should be able to see the already created supply for the long lead time part.

However, on initial testing of this process PMRP appears to not be seeing the manually created purchase requisition and is instead creating a second purchase req which would be a duplicate order if not noticed.

What are the likely causes of this? Why wouldn’t PMRP take into account a manually raised purchase req for the activity?

Update: Once the manually created purchase req was released, it appears to have seen it. In planned status, it provided duplicate.