How do you document and workflow for action a material purchase requirement when almost everything is unknown? Our implementation of ERP utilizes PS to create budget structures and fund Programs at a very crude and simplistic level. Here is $500K to make a boat. We'll establish some NWA's to identify big blocks of the effort, say management, design/engineering, manufacturing. But we do not utilize ERP to break it down into finite little pieces like "procure aluminum plate" and "weld stern plate into hull". We give the machine shop a NWA with say $100K and a stack of drawings from Engineering and say have at it.
If you are Bob on the shop floor and you need a 4x8 sheet of Aluminum for the boat job, and this is all you know, how to start?
In our implementation, we are filling out paper forms and routing them to gather the required information to procure the sheet of aluminum and then entering that into ERP.
I would think there is a mechanism to create a blank PR with many unknowns, and route this to responsible individuals who can update and pass on until we have a completed PR.
So what do we gather on paper? Is it a material or a service? Will it be AAC= N or Q? What NWA/WBS/SO is appropriate for this sheet? Can the sheet be found in inventory, have all the required sources been checked, what commercial entities can provide it? Does the sheet have an assigned Material Master or does one need to be created? What dollar value are we at, for us diffenrent values trigger different proceses?
So in my ideal world, a clerk enters into ERP Bob's request in it's most basic form: "4x8 sheet of aluminum for boat job" and routes it to the Boat Program Team. The Program Team identifies the appropriate funding and routes it to a Sceening Group. The screening group checks to see if a Material Master exists for "4x8 sheet of aluminum" and works with Bob to verify they found it or get's it created. Then they research available inventory in ERP, if that fails they check mandatory sources of supply, and if all else fails identifies a commercial source of supply. The Screeing Group then forwards the request to the Procurement Team. Now we have all we need to know, we negotiate terms and conditions and place the order.