SAP QM for Heijunka production levelling

[Former Member]

Hello Experts,

Can anybody refer me to existing knowledge base in establishing SAP QM when the production planning is based on Heijunka ?

Heijunka basically asks to reduce the production lot size and try to include variety of different products who follows the same production sequence.

Thus to produce 1000 quantity of a product with heijunka based production lot of 100 quantity, there will be 10 production orders. The system is designed to create at-least 1 inspection lot and hence to ask for at-least 1 inspection to be carried out per production order.

This results in 10 inspections for a total production quantity of 1000 pieces.

Our requirement for inspection is to do it every 500th product. Hence the total inspections carried out are 10 instead of 2. This consumes time and we want to avoid this.

Any suggestions??

Thanks & Regards,

Rajesh Sangpal

[Former Member]

Hello Guys,

I created a DMR defining two levels of inspection at Inspection lot stage

Defined two inspection levels i.e. Normal inspection (1) and skipped inspection(2)

And assigned this DMR for the inspection plan for an article to be inspected (in-process inspections)

With this rule now, whenever Heijunka planning create multiple production orders (of small quantity), the first lot requires inspection to be carried (normal inspection), next 4 lots does not require any result recording (skipped inspections) and system comes back to normal inspection on 6th lot.

We need to make usage decision on each of these lot anyways. If any of the lots is rejected in between the system will follow normal inspection again.

This is of course an interim solution to Heijunka production planning but we will be able to perform inspections based on quantity produced.

Thanks and Regards,

Rajesh Sangpal

[Former Member]

A little comeback on the happenings on this issue:

There are currently only two workarounds for the issue:

1. System shall not create any inspection lot with the released order. The inspection lot is manually created as and when it is required.

As the inspection lot creation is completely manual here, the risk of having no inspection just because the lot was not generated is high.

2. System creates an inspection lot for each released order. Enable "skips allowed" in the material master for the article and skip the inspection lots that does not fit the inspection schedule (we plan to perform inspections 3 times a shift)

As Craig already mentioned, the fact that grouping of materials is a potential barrier here. The output will be something but not as fluent as it should be.

I was just reading through dynamic modification rule (DMR). In this function, we can change the frequency of inspection based on the outcome of previous inspections (normal, reduced and tightened inspections).

I was wondering if we can use this as a solution to my original problem. e.g. under normal frequency system creates an inspection lot and upon one successful inspection system switches to reduced inspections thereby skipping some (say 2 lots). After skipping these 2 lots it comes back to normal frequency and creates one inspection again.

We will at-least achieve a quantity based inspections with this logic (if the order quantity is 100, it will ensure an inspection every 200 produced parts )

Does this seem logical?

[former_member42743]

I'm don't see how doing those setting would help.  Basically you just set him up to have one inspection lot for every process order.

Since in his example he has ten orders of 100 units, so he'll get ten inspection lots.

The added difficulty for this design is that the design includes a grouping of materials.  If the process was for a single material, potentially some form of skip lots might work.

But since the process is based on multiple materials, standard skip lot I don't think will work. The only way I can see standard skip lots working would be they used one material number and made it a configurable material.  So that each order could be configured for each order.  Or maybe they coudl have different BOM's for the same material. Without knowing their business process it would be impossible to say that is viable.  I'm sure they selected this planning porcess for a logical reasons.  (however they often don't include quality in these decisions!!!).

But off hand, I don't see any standard way of supporting Heijunka with the standard SAP QM processes wthout doing some significant development.

Craig

[former_member201849]

Hi Rajesh

To achive your requirement please follow the below process.

1. I hope you are using 04 Inspection type.

2. Go to QM view of the Material Master.

3. Select the 04 Inspection Type and below Change the Control Inspection Lot to "X For each Order         Item,batch and Store Location".

4. Now try your scenario after changing to this setting.

Please check and update.

Regards

Suresh.M