MRP Experts Share Microsoft Dynamics NAV Best Practices

At a recent NAVUG webinar Bob Buccigrossi Business System Improvement Manager at EBO Group, Inc., Kevin Fons Materials and ERP Manager at Saris Cycling Group and Lewis Rosenberg, IT Manager, Mars Fishcare answered members' questions around managing and automating manufacturing practices with Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

Among the concerns of the audience were the right ways to get started with material requirements planning (MRP), automating capacity planning, and different methods for directed put-away and pick.

Q. How do you set up MRP?

A. Buccigrossi: The most important thing is to find someone within your department who is a manufacturing expert. If you don't have anyone then you want to rely on resources like the NAV User Group or your partner and they will take you through the item cards and the necessity of setting up the item cards, the planning tab. One word of advice is that you start with a product or a group of products that you know very well-that you can process through your system over and over again so you've learned how to do it in a perfect world. And you start with that and take baby steps from there rather than trying to roll out MRP for all your products or the vast majority of them. Start with one or two products that you can run through-make those recommendations through your planning worksheet. To start setting it up and to actually process it is definitely a project.

Fons: Additionally you need to find out how the forecast works and how it feeds into your planning because there are a lot of different options in the forecasting. With the forecast it's going ...