Many small manufacturers operate procedures where all the necessary purchase and works order paperwork are produced as soon as a sales order is accepted. In a manual system there are benefits to this as it makes progressing the job easier and more visible. In a Match-IT system such an ‘up-front’ procedure has no benefit, and in fact is a major hindrance to efficient operation. To gain the most benefit from Match-IT, or any similar system, some discipline is required by your production staff. In particular, it is important that no work is done without an approved works order to cover it. Also, they must either use the material batches allocated or tell the system what actual batches they used. This discipline is critical to a successful implementation.

Match-IT is a lazy system. It does all the planning to determine what purchase and works orders are required when a sales order is accepted, but does not commit to them. Instead it leaves them in a reserved state. The significance of this is that while they are just reserved, your plans can be changed very easily to meet changed circumstances by manipulating these reservations. When you approve a purchase or works order, only that order becomes committed, the rest stay reserved. Any subsequent planning will then make use of these committed orders instead of creating new reservations.

Another crucial concept is the relationship between sales orders, purchase orders and works orders. Your requirements for purchase and works orders are produced by analysing the methods attached to the products in your sales orders. When doing this, it’s looking at your stock and your order book as a whole. This means purchase and works orders can be shared between sales orders in very complex ways. Also, if you’ve got stock to partially fulfil a sales order or any step within it, your requirement for new purchase and works orders will be just for the shortfall.

The system knows at all times why a purchase or works order is required and can show you that reason. However, the requirement can change, or even disappear, as a result of re-planning. This is why the system is lazy. If a requirement disappears, due to re-planning for example, and it’s only been reserved then nothing is lost. However, if you’d committed to everything up-front and the requirement subsequently disappeared, you would be incurring costs that cannot be recovered easily.

An understanding of the relationship between your method descriptions and the resultant purchase and works orders is also important. The complete production description for one of your products may involve assemblies containing sub-assemblies requiring raw materials, encompassing many individual method descriptions. Purchase requirements for the raw materials are produced as necessary. This relationship is straightforward and self-evident. However, the relationship to the works orders may not be straightforward. A works order may span many methods, a single method or only part of a single method. The works order ‘boundaries’ within your overall structure are referred to as modules. The position of these module boundaries is controlled by the method. This means you can choose to have a works order cover as much, or as little, of the overall job as you wish.

The important point here is that you can design your methods and module boundaries in a way that gives you the most efficient and flexible production options. The system keeps track of everything for you no matter what, so you don’t need to compromise your procedures in any way, as you may have needed to in a manual system.