Take this post as my suggestion on how to work with “Warning icons”. Any other idea is welcome, let’s comment on that !!
Back from NAV 5.0 SP1, warning icons were added to the Planning Worksheet to raise exceptional situations. There are three type of scenarios here:
- Emergency (ie. inventory is negative)
- Exception (ie. inventory below safety stock)
- Attention (ie. planning start date is earlier than workdate)
Warning icon in the Planning Worksheet identify one of above cases. Now, if you carefully check the planning line, you will notice that the “Accept Action Message” flag is disabled when warning icon identifies any of the above scenarios. Why? This is simpler: NAV is not suggesting to carry out the planning line, it only raise that there is a situation which needs to be managed and it provides further info about when (due date) and what (quantity) is the minimum to bring the situation to normal (ie. if this is an exception, it will do a backward scheduling from the date inventory is below safety stock with just the quantity required to make it equal to safety).
So, NAV only raise the exception, emergency or brings attention to the planner. But, it leaves planner the decission about what to do here. Why is this? Why having a planning tool which does not help me here? Well, I can tell you that different customers treats exception differently. I can tell you that it is nothing to be what one customer does with the other (one can wait till next suppy raise to increase quantity, other creates an “urgent” supply, other …). Thus, it will be hard difficul to agree on a common behaviour here. Also, the above scenarios are exceptional. Thus, it should not happen regularly, it should happen only in rare occasions. Thus, it is not required to implement a full functionality (which we might not agree on the common behaviour among customers as stated above) since customer will not have this but in rare times.
Thus, NAV leaves the decission to the planner on what to do to avoid any of the above exceptional scenarios. It does this by:
- raising/warning the planner: setting the Warning icon
- disabling the “Accept Action message”: planner needs to decide before carrying out