Tackling timelines... Material request "Required Date", Purchase order "Required By Date", and Gantt Charts?

Hi everyone,

Our material planning process is basically this:

  1. Issue RFQ, asking for best deliver-by dates.
  2. Create Material requests with “Required Date” based around incoming quotes, and around production needs.
  3. Issue purchase orders to those with low pricing and who can meet our required date. “Required By Date” automatically taken from material request created in step 2.

ERPNext handles the above 3 steps wonderfully. I unfortunately don’t believe we can generate a Gantt chart view of the outstanding purchase orders or material requests, but at least the info is there.

This is where things get messy in the real world…
4. Supplier experiences a setback and updates their best delivery date to something beyond our required by date.
5. Parts are delivered late.

How do others deal with changing anticipated delivery dates?

There can be trickle-down effects if a supplier is late on a shipment, such as not being able to satisfy your own delivery commitments. We don’t have any operation steps added to our BOMs yet, but it would be ideal to have everything be able to “fishbone” down to update an overall delivery date for the produced BOM, and generate alarms should this affect other commitments (sales). In the interim, it would be nice to at least be able to show dates on a gantt chart and highlight ones that are late, or be able to update anticipated delivery dates somewhere.

Looking forward to hearing what others do about this, thanks.

For reference, using ERP v7.

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