The Lead Times Utility calculates the Manufacturing Fixed and Variable Lead Times shown on the Item Resource Planning window. The WilloWare utility has several important improvements over the similar utility provided in the Manufacturing Module:
- It is significantly faster because it only updates Item-Site records where the lead times have changed (the MFG utility updates all records even if there is no change). Also, the WilloWare utility runs completely in SQL while the MFG utility primarily is dexterity.
- It supports assigning a Routing to each Item-Site record which it uses to perform Item-Site specific updates (the MFG utility updates all Item-Sites to the same value using the Primary Routing).
- It generates a report after the utility runs shows the before and after values on the records it updated (the MFG utility provides no feedback).
- It tracks all changes (before and after values) in a history table along with the Date and User (the MFG utility just performs the mass update).
- It correctly handles Quantity Next Start and Parallel Sequences (the MFG utility has bugs in how it handles routings that use either or both of those features).
The Lead Times Utility can update one item, all items, or specific item-sites using a Lead Time Batch.
