Of the items that our shop produces, a majority of them are made to order, and we create Sales Orders, and thus Production Orders for them, and the process runs smoothly.
We also have parts that are in constant demand, we know that we will sell a few thousand of them a year, but not exactly how many orders of them we will have at any given time, how many items are in which order, and when the delivery dates will be. It is equally likely that we will get 3 orders for 200 parts each to be delivered at the end of January, February and March as it is that we will get 1 order for 50 to be delivered in january and 1 order for 550 of them to be delivered at the end of March. So flexibility is key here.
What I would like to be able to do is create a Production Order to constantly make those parts, until we hit a certain stock threshold where we can likely ship what is ordered at any point. this would eliminate the tying of materials to a specific production order, as we often have requests to move one order backwards and another forward, but they are sometimes the exact same item, just on a different Production order!
We tried the idea of having a large production order (500 units) run over the course of 6 months, but that skews our material requirements by allocating all raw stock to that order, and making it seem like we did not have stock for other orders that also use the same raw materials We also considered having smaller orders, maybe 100 monthly, but then we wind up with a large number of production orders clogging our tablet screen. we also can't operate without a production order for those parts, as we need a way to reliably check inventory, time, and production status of WIP.
Are there any other ways to create Production Orders like this? We would have maybe 6-10 of them at any point, and they would be considered like "If you don't have anything else in production now, you work on these." parts. Help is welcomed!
