MES to ERP Transaction Design

[TimT]

I've worked on a few projects over the past several yeas that have required MES to send the Date of Manufacture back to ERP to calculate the Expiration Date of the header batch material. This has always been frustrating from an MES perspective because it creates several complexities like defining a mechanism for not allowing the recipe to advance until the expiration is updated as well as an ERP like SAP not being able to calculate expiration dates in anything less than days. Why not have the ERP pass the material's SLED to MES in the Material Master transaction and trust it to calculate the expiration and pass it back to ERP? I'm also curious if anyone has approached this transaction design differently on other projects?

[Hoodini]

ERP should send the SLED to MES as part of material master, because MES needs to calculate and assign an expiry to outputs anyways, and it might as well be the right one to keep ERP and MES in sync.

When MES sends a goods receipt transaction to ERP, either the DOM or DOE should be sent. I've seen it both ways and either are valid if MES has the SLED and is calculating the same way as ERP. MES shouldn't wait for an acknowledgement - MES has already assigned the same expiry and hence can use the output safely in forward processing.

When it comes to granularity of time, different ERP handle this differently but in SAP a custom attribute and custom functionality needs to be configured in order to track time. A separate material master attribute can be carved out to track whether or not a particular material is time sensitive.