DATE: 26-JUN-2025
Why doesn’t this item appear in MRP? Who hasn’t asked this question? Why is this other stuff showing up in MRP when I don’t think it should? Another great question!
Scroll down for a cool new tool for managing MRP, but first the background.
A client contacted us to help investigate why they had a huge number of Item-Site records in IV00102 that they swear nobody created. The problem records were all Work Centers where they wouldn’t normally store inventory so they wouldn’t assign items to those sites (as you know, Manufacturing requires that Work Centers also be Sites).
The first thought was somebody mass assigned a Site to Items. We deleted over 20,000 “bad” Item-Site records from the table, but a short time later they had several thousand of the bad records again. It was apparent that something was automatically creating them, and the only thing that seemed a possible culprit was MRP.
We repeated the “bad” record deletion in a test company and ran MRP and watched it adding records to IV00102. At this point we noticed that all of the bad records were in the MRP Exclusion List as “Inactive”.
The MRP Exclusion List “Type” options are confusing. Here is what each option actually does:
- VIEW ONLY: The Item is included in MRP Calculations but does not show in the MRP windows
- VIEW AND CALCULATE: This one corresponds to NOT marking the Calculate MRP checkbox, in other words the Item is excluded entirely from MRP (it is not calculated and it does not show in the MRP windows)
- INACTIVE: It sounds like the Item/Site/Item-Site would be ‘inactive’ for MRP but what it does is include the item in MRP calculations and only show it if there is activity
The root of the Item-Sites problem is that you can add Item-Site pairs to the exclusion list as INACTIVE where the Item-Site assignment does not exist. When MRP runs it creates records for those items in IV00102. In addition, you see all sorts of results in MRP for these items that appear to be excluded because they are INACTIVE.
There’s more…
The Exclusion List window is not just “exclusions”. As described above the Type field also results in different things happening when an item is INCLUDED in the calculations. As you can see in the screen shot above, the Exclusions List allows TRIPLICATE records. This happens because the key on the MRP Exclusions table (MP030000) is Item, Site, Exclusion Type. This creates a situation where different parts of MRP will handle the Item differently depending on what it is looking up in the Exclusions Table.
We created a better way to manage MRP Exclusions.
The new MRP Exclusion Utility in MFG PowerPack gives you one place to manage all the settings that affect whether or not an Item is included in MRP. From this window you can change the Calc MRP flag and/or change the MRP Exclusion setting.
Given the issues described above with the Exclusion List “Type” options we strongly encourage you to only use Calc MRP checkbox because this will enforce the Exclusion List table containing ONLY items/sites/item-sites that are EXCLUDED.
MRP Exclusion Utility breaks out Work Centers separately from regular Sites. Usually, inventory is not stored in Work Centers, so this view provides an easy way to mass update all Work Center-Sites to “unmark” the Calc MRP checkbox. Note the small downward arrow above the CALC MRP column header–this will rolldown the adjacent checkbox to all displayed records.
MRP Exclusion Utility flags errors–records where the Calc MRP flag is not compatible with the MRP Exclusion setting.
The Rebuild Exclusions button clears the MRP Exclusion table and repopulates it based on Calc MRP settings in:
- Site Resource Planning
- Item Engineering
- Item Resource Planning
Note: Rebuild Exclusions leverages an existing Manufacturing utility under Tools >> Utilities >> Manufacturing >> MRP Exclusion Build. Unfortunately, the MFG utility does not clear the table first, so if there are any ‘bad’ records in there such as the triplicates described above, it will not clear them. Our MRP Exclusion Utility clears the table first so you are starting with clean data.
MRP Exclusion Utility is available now if you have the Suite License. Just download an install the latest build.