Managing Effectivity dates in Agile vs ERP
Does anyone have experience in managing a baseline BOM in agile, pushing it into XA and managing changes to an effectivity date. I have a customer who currently manages effectivity dates in XA, they are creating structured BOM’s in Agile and will be setting the effectivity date there as well and then pushing the baseline into XA. Questions are: anyone currently doing this and have any hints and what happens when you have to change an effectivity date (does it require another change in Agile, since you are changing the baseline) or do you allow some flexibility in the ERP.
Thanks in advance
Yes… managing effectivity dates in Agile is a tricky art form. First let me warn you that this activity takes a well-practiced team to manage. For example, BOM A rev B has an effectivity date out 2 months, then comes a change to BOM A for rev C. This cannot happen until after the 2 month effectivity date…. can be very problematic. Also, I am not quite familiar with XA but most ERP systems can manage the dates based on inventory depletions automatically so they can easily manage the cut in. You are very correct in your assumption that in order to change the dates in Agile you would need to run another change. This is not easy activity. You could unrelease and re-release the change although I do not recommend this as it could lead to another set of complications.
My recommendation is this, provide the business with the options;
1) manage the dates in Agile PLM and utilize a change to manage moving dates
2) allow ERP to manage the dates and make certain the managing team can police them back to Agile through change diligence
3) allow for a procedural handling of effectivity date management whereby the change stipulates a disposition and regardless of the date, that disposition is effective until the activity is fully complete.
- for example – UAI, SCRAP, etc… which means you can comply with the disposition until the inventory have been completely used up
Patrick,
I was thinking in the same direction, We weren’t sure if there was some neat little trick that could facilitate this issue. We had not thought of option 2 which is a possibility. Thank you so much for your feedback and recommendations. My customer also is extremely appreciative. You are an Agile Angel.