In this task your planners and work center supervisors will release jobs to production.
Education:
Shop Control Guide - Releasing Jobs to Production
Screen Help - Job Control Panel
Shop Control Screenshot Series
Video - Shop Control Guideline Job Release
Training Tasks:
•Release all jobs to production with available material
•Review Job Costs Inquiry prior to Job Release
•Print job travelers.
Release earlier than Planned Start dates
For training purposes, release jobs earlier than their Planned Start dates, provided that material is available, even though this is not recommended in actual practice.
Job Release Guideline
Do not release jobs without allocated material
Do not release jobs to production without allocated material. Material availability provides the means by which jobs are started in proper order of assembly and rescheduled to reflect actual release dates. Releasing without allocated material disables the self-adjusting nature of the master schedule and distorts material allocation for other jobs.
Review Est Job Cost Inquiry prior to Job Release
From the Job > Job Control Panel > Release Jobs screen you should review the EstJob Cost Inquiry prior to updating your Job Release. Always make sure that your Estimated Job Costs are reasonable and within your expectations. If you encounter errors in material costs or routing costs, correct them in the Job directly and perform a Cost Rollup and apply the changes to NEW jobs to update your existing estimated costs. You want all of your employees to take a pro-active approach to costs and this will minimize errors down the road that are very hard to fix after the job is finished.
Common Questions
Can shop control be used without MRP?
Shop control is designed to work in conjunction with a master schedule where jobs and POs reflect aggregate demand and supply dates are coordinated with demand dates. This can only be achieved by generating the master schedule using MRP.
Can shop control be used without an accurate inventory?
Job release is the foundation of shop control because it determines when jobs go into live production and reschedules job finish dates when needed to update the master schedule with realistic supply dates. Job release is dictated by material availability, which requires an accurate inventory. Furthermore, shop control is designed to work in conjunction with a coordinated master schedule, which requires MRP generation that also depends on an accurate inventory for net demand calculations.
If you are operating with an unreliable inventory, you will be unable to use DBA with any success. There are two key practices you can implement to correct this problem:
•Make BOM accuracy an absolute requirement in your company culture. Whenever BOM errors are encountered during the course of a job, make sure the parent BOM gets corrected for the benefit of future jobs. BOM errors are the source of many inventory problems.
•Issue material in real time using the Material icon in the Work Center Schedule screen instead of after the fact at time of job closing. This takes no extra time because material must be issued at some point anyway. Real time issuing eliminates potential delays to job receipts and will give your personnel confidence that inventory numbers have reliable meaning.
Why can’t I manually reschedule New status jobs?
When a job is initially generated, it is given a status of New and a planned start and finish date derived from its parent item’s Lead Days and Job Days settings. Manual rescheduling of New status job dates is not permitted prior to job release because doing so would disrupt the inter-connected date relationships that comprise the master schedule.
Instead, job rescheduling is done automatically when material availability enables jobs to be released to production in the Job Control Panel. If the actual release date differs from the planned start date, the job finish date is rescheduled to update the master schedule with a realistic supply date.
Can job release be bypassed?
Job release is a mandatory process. It determines which jobs can be released to live production based on material availability. If the job release date differs from the planned start date, the job finish date is rescheduled to update the master schedule with a realistic supply date.
Job release saves a great deal of time because you always know exactly when jobs can be started without having to manually investigate whether purchased components have been received or subassemblies completed.
Is it harmful to release jobs without material?
The job release process makes it much easier to manage actual work in process out in the shop. It ensures that all new jobs have sufficient material to get started and that job finish dates are updated to correspond with actual release dates.
Whenever the Job Control Panel screen is launched, a batch process allocates component stock on hand to all open jobs. Material is allocated first to Released status jobs in Planned Start date order and then to New status jobs in Planned Start date order.
It is vitally important that you only release jobs for which material has been fully allocated to all job components. If you ignore the allocation and release a job anyway, the released job “steals” allocated material from non-released jobs and the rescheduling function is compromised.
When multiple levels are made on the same day, should all the jobs be released at once?
When you use MRP for job generation, it is highly unlikely that multi-level subassembly jobs will be scheduled to start on the same day. This phenomenon typically only occurs when manual planning is used to create job chains. Start date overlap is just one of many problems caused by job chaining and is best corrected by using MRP.
If it so happens that multi-level jobs do get scheduled to start on the same day, never release the jobs all at once, which can only be done by ignoring the material shortage warning. If you release jobs without material, they all get listed in work center queues as active jobs and there is no way to know which job sequence should be run next.
If you release jobs only when material is fully allocated, jobs will get released in perfect order.
Is it necessary to release jobs several times a day?
Job release is not a once a day process. If you have a relatively high volume of multi-level jobs, jobs should be released periodically throughout the day after finished items are received so that higher level jobs can be released in a timely fashion as subassembly jobs get completed.
Releasing jobs is a simple process that is a big time-saver because it eliminates all the manual investigation that would otherwise be needed to determine which jobs are completed and which ones are to be started next.
