Material availability check for work orders

Supervisors can do a material availability check for work orders. This process is relevant for organizations that want to confirm that all the required spare parts are available before workers start maintenance work. For example, a supervisor is responsible for all corrective maintenance at a manufacturing site. As a standard procedure, the supervisor checks whether all the materials that are required for each work order are available. After availability is confirmed, the supervisor releases the materials to maintenance workers for processing.

Prerequisites

Before you can use this feature, your system must meet the following requirements:

• You must be running Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management version 10.0.37 or later.
• The feature that's named Material availability check on maintenance work orders must be turned on in feature management.

How the material availability check works

The material availability check for work orders uses a standard master planning run to calculate the inventory availability of all required materials. Material demand for work orders is generated by journal lines in the project item journal that's related to each work order. A journal line can be created, or it can be copied from the work order's item forecast. Learn more in Maintenance forecasts.

Supervisors use a dedicated page to run the material availability check for a selected range of work orders. From this page, supervisors can run the master plan and then view the material availability status for each of the selected work orders. The page also provides information about material availability of the individual spare parts that are required for the selected work orders.

Check material availability for work orders

Follow these steps to check material availability for work orders.

1. Go to Asset management > Work orders > All work orders.

2. Use the Filter field and the column header filters to select the range of work orders that you want to check material availability for. All work orders that are shown on the page will be checked.

3. On the Action Pane, on the Work Order tab, select Material availability check.

   The Work order material availability check page that appears is divided into two sections. The Work orders section in the upper part of the page shows the work orders. The On-hand inventory section in the lower part of the page shows journal lines that are related to the work order that's selected in the Work orders section.

4. In the Work orders section, select a work order. Confirm that there's a check mark in the Journal lines created column for the order. If there's no check mark, use one of the following methods to create the journal lines:

   • Create the journal lines from a forecast:

     1. Select Forecast on the toolbar.

     2. On the Work order maintenance forecast page, on the Items FastTab, confirm that there are item forecast lines for the order. If there are no lines, you can add them by selecting Add, Add spare parts, or Add BOM items on the toolbar.

        Tip

        The system will automatically generate item forecast lines for work orders if you set up default forecasts on the Maintenance job type defaults page.

     3. Close the Work order maintenance forecast page to return to the Work order material availability check page.

     4. Select Copy journals from forecast on the toolbar.

     5. In the Copy from forecast dialog box, set the Item field to Yes.

     6. Select OK.

     7. Select Refresh at the top of the page.

     8. Confirm that there's now a check mark in the Journal lines created column.

   • Create the journal from the Work order journals page:

     1. Select Journals on the toolbar.
     2. On the Work order journals page, on the Items FastTab, add a line to the grid.
     3. Close the Work order journals page to return to the Work order material availability check page.
     4. Select Refresh at the top of the page.
     5. Confirm that there's now a check mark in the Journal lines created column.

5. Run the material availability check by selecting Material availability check on the toolbar.

   Note

   You can select multiple work orders for the material availability check.

6. In the Material availability check dialog box, set the following fields:

   • Run mode – Select one of the following values to specify the type of check that you want to do:

     • Master planning + Availability check – First, master planning is run for the products that are related to the work orders. A material availability check for the orders is then run based on the master planning result.
     • Availability check only – A material availability check is run based on data from the latest version of the master planning.

     Tip

     If you're currently just exploring the feature (for example, by using demo data), select Master planning + Availability check.

   • Plan – Select the master plan to use when master planning is run. Typically, the master plan that represents the dynamic master plan should be used.

7. Select OK to run the check.

   In the Work orders section of the Work order material availability page, a symbol in the Ready to be released column indicates the material availability status of each selected work order.

   Symbol	Description
   	The check couldn't be run for this work order because there's no material demand for it. Make sure that there's a journal line for the order.
   	All materials for the work order are fully available.
   	Some or all of the materials for the work order aren't available.

8. In the Work orders section, select a work order. In the On-hand inventory section, a symbol in the Material availability column indicates the availability of each material for the selected work order.

   Symbol	Description
   	The required material is fully available. The Requested quantity field shows the quantity that's requested by the work order. For material in this status, the quantity in the Requested quantity field equals the quantity in the On-hand settled field.
   	The required material is unavailable or only partially available. For material in this status, the quantity in the Requested quantity field isn't fully covered by the quantity in the On-hand settled field. Instead, it's covered by a combination of the quantities in the On-hand settled, Planned order settled, and/or Order settled fields.

   Tip

   To get more information about how the demand for the requested quantity is covered, select Inventory > Explosion on the toolbar in the On-hand inventory section.

The material availability check is now completed. If you want, you can now update the state of orders that are ready to be worked on by maintenance workers, as described in the next section.

Update a work order state

After you've confirmed that all materials are available for a work order, you can update the work order state. In this way, you can indicate that the order is now ready to be worked on by maintenance workers.

1. If the Work order material availability check page isn't already open, open it as described in the previous section.

2. If you need help finding the work orders that you're looking for, use the Material availability field to filter the work orders in the Work orders section. Select one of the following options:

   • All – Show all work orders.
   • Upcoming – Show only work orders where some or all materials aren't available.
   • Available – Show only work orders where all materials are available. These orders are ready to be worked on by maintenance workers.

   For this procedure, select Available to show the work orders where all materials are available. You can now change the work order state of these orders to indicate that they're ready to be worked on by maintenance workers.

3. In the Work orders section, select one or more orders that you want to update.

4. Select Update work order state on the toolbar.

5. In the Update work order state dialog box, select the next work order state for the selected work orders.

6. Select OK to confirm the change.