WIP Discrete Jobs and wip_job_schedule_interface / Allow Explosion and Scheduling

WIP Discrete Jobs and wip_job_schedule_interface / Allow Explosion and Scheduling

One of our customers was working with a process to create and update WIP Discrete Jobs via the wip_job_schedule_interface.  While this work was being performed via API Wizard (the great Oracle EBS tool which lets you use Excel to perform data entry, updating, and reporting), this blog is relevant to both those using API Wizard and those working directly with the interface table wip_job_schedule_interface.

The issue the customer was having was that they would often change routing information in WIP Operations and on the Job, sometimes modifying and sometimes removing resource requirements.  When they would update existing Discrete Jobs using wip_job_schedule_interface, both the WIP Operations and the Discrete Job's resource requirements would be defaulted back to that of the item Routing.  

It turns out that all that was needed to resolve this was to set the 'ALLOW_EXPLOSION' field to 'N' (for no!).  Once that was done, the WIP Operation and Discrete Job's resource requirements were not changed.

So far, so good.

There was an issue though.  Once the allow_explosion parameter was set to 'N', the records were failing with a scheduling error "Invalid value for scheduling method".  Here there were two issues; first they needed to change the scheduling method to manual, required when allow_explosion is set to 'N'.  Once that was done, the next error was "You must enter both dates for nonstandard jobs without a routing reference".  They were already passing the first unit dates (first_unit_start_date, first_unit_completion_date) but also had to pass the last_unit dates (last_unit_start_date, last_unit_completion_date).  With those final changes, everything worked as desired!  However, it must be noted that the sacrifice made here is that the schedules must be calculated manually rather than using the interface's routing-based schedule option.  This was handled through some logic in a wrapper to ensure the dates were populated correctly.  

A quick note for completion's sake:

In addition to wip_job_schedule_interface, this process also uses wip_job_dtls_interface for loading components, operation sequences, and resources.

Addendum:

One of our customers who wanted to use the Routing-Based Scheduling option without having the Job operations and resources overwritten by the BOM Routing default found that they could use the private API:

wip_infinite_scheduler_pvt.schedule

They say it works great.  Being a private API, not all organizations will use it but since its scope is fairly limited (to the scheduling of an existing job), it appears to be fairly low risk in the scheme of things.

So that throws another option into the mix!