Twelve seal kits for six pumps
What the user reports
Monday 21 December. On Thursday the product team reloaded ES-200's bill of material from a spreadsheet, and on Friday morning the production supervisor created and released the order for six pumps. On Friday afternoon the product engineer noticed the reload said two seal kits per pump and corrected it to one. Six seal kits were bought for the six pumps, and assembly finished this morning.
The error: Assembly's confirmation refused on the dispatch list: the backflush needs 12 seal kits (CP-SK200) and only 6 are in stock.
What you'll do
- See the problem as the shop floor operator: On Dispatch list, at ASSY1, confirm operation 0010 on the order for six: yield 6, scrap 0, 12 hours, shift 1.
- Find the cause: ES-200's bill of material says one seal kit per pump, and six were bought for six pumps. Why does the backflush want twelve?
- Fix it as the production supervisor.
- Prove it: run the step that failed again.
The drill runs in the lab on its own prepared copy of the fictional Calder Pumpworks, saved in this browser apart from your company. All codes and values are fictional course labels.
Answer and explanation (open after the drill)
The fix: The order copied the bill when it was created, before the correction: it still says two per pump.
A production order takes a copy of the bill of material when it is created, so the plan for that order can't change under the people working on it. The engineer's correction changed the bill, not the order made from it on Friday morning, which still lists 12 seal kits for 6 pumps. The backflush issues what the order says. Production orders shows the difference, and the order can read the bill again until its first operation is confirmed.
Why it broke
An order is a snapshot: it copies the bill of material and the routing when it is created, so a change to the bill doesn't move orders already made from it. Here that protected nothing and hid a typo: the order kept two seal kits per pump after the bill was fixed. Had six more seal kits been in stock, the backflush would have issued twelve without a word, and the order would have settled six seal kits over standard.
How teams prevent it
A change to a bill of material lists the open orders made from the old version, and the engineer decides for each one: read the bill again, or keep the order as it is. Mass loads go through a test system and a check against the old bill first (two seal kits per pump against one is a doubling). A backflush that issues more than the standard quantity per unit raises a flag before settlement.
Across teams
The product team loaded the bill, the product engineer corrected it, the production supervisor created the order in between, the assemblers can't confirm, and the controller would have found the cost a week later. A bill of material belongs to engineering; the orders made from it belong to production; the gap between them is where this lives.
Where AI fits
Comparing each open order's components with today's bill of material is plain automation, and the lab now does it on Production orders. A model can help upstream: compare a bill being loaded with the old one and similar products and flag quantities that look wrong (predict), or read the reason for an engineering change and list the orders it should reach (retrieve). Deciding which orders change stays with the engineer.
Learn more: Plan to produce end to end