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Release notes

4.4 (Upcoming release)

Production planning

  • Resources can now have an efficiency percentage. This allows the resource to perform an operation faster or slower than the standard operation time.

  • The resource report now displays the available capacity as a line, replacing the green bar in previous releases to show the free capacity.

  • Performance optimization of the solver algorithm. The solver now passes down the minimum shipment information from the demand to all upstream entities, which allows the algorithm to perform a more efficient search.
    In complex models, the resulting plan may be slightly different - for the better.

  • Resource build-ahead penalty calculation now also working for 0-cost resources.

  • New rows to the purchase order summary and distribution order summary reports to show the quantity on order or in transit.

  • New rows to the inventory report to show 1) days of cover of the starting inventory, 2) the safety stock and 3) more details on the supply and consumption type.

  • The minimum field on the buffer defines a safety stock. In previous releases this safety stock was effective from the horizon start in 1971. Now this safety stock is effective from the current date of the plan onwards.
    This change will give a different result for safety stock replenishments in an unconstrained plan. In a lead time constrained plan the results will be identical.

  • Remove buffers of type procurement from the planning engine code. This buffer type was already long reprecated and hasn’t been accessible to users for quite some time now.

  • Simpler and more generic modeling of fixed material consumption and production by operations. The types ‘fixed_end’ and ‘fixed_start’ on operation material records are replaced with a field ‘fixed_quantity’.

  • Renamed the “demand plan detail” report to delivery orders, and enable uploading confirmed or approved shipments to customers as input data.

  • When expanding a confirmed manufacturing order on a routing operation, the automatic creation of the child manufacturing orders for each routing step now also considers the post-operation time.
    Note that such child manufacturing orders are only generated if they aren’t provided in the input data yet.

Inventory planning

  • The safety stock and ROQ minimum/maximum period of cover are now expressed in days. It was before entered as the number of period buckets, the period bucket being the value of the inventoryplanning.calendar parameter.

Forecasting (Enterprise & Cloud Editions)

  • Forecast parameters forecast.Net_NetEarly and forecast.Net_NetLate are now expressed in days (previously they were expressed in seconds).

Inventory planning

  • The safety stock and ROQ minimum/maximum period of cover are now expressed in days. It was before entered as the number of period buckets, the period bucket being the value of the inventoryplanning.calendar parameter.

User interface

  • Bug fix when copying a what-if scenario into another what-if scenario.

  • Bug fix when uploading data files using the Microsoft Edge browser.

Deprecation

  • Operations of types alternate, routing and split should not load any resources, or consume or produce materials. The suboperations should model all material and capacity usage instead.
    Note that in the majority of models, the explicit modeling of alternate operations is no longer needed. The planning engine detects situations where an item-location can be replenished in multiple ways and automatically generates an alternate operation.

4.3.4 (2018/06/08)

Forecasting (Enterprise & Cloud Editions)

  • The forecast error used in frePPLe is SMAPE. This has a counter intuitive property that provides values in the range from 0% to 200%.
    We redefine the SMAPE metric now to half the previous value to give a more intuitive range between 0% and 100%. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_mean_absolute_percentage_error for the alternate definitions of SMAPE.

  • Forecast report is now also showing the cumumlative backlog of the orders and forecast, i.e. the demand that is planned later than its due date.

Production planning

  • The plan editor now automatically initializes the Gantt chart rows and the color codes for the item and operation category and subcategory values.
    Personalized configurations are preserved, and the new logic is only used to initialize the screen with new values.

  • Added new reports purchase order summary and distribution order summary to summarize the purchase orders or distribution orders per time bucket.

  • For consistency with the previous change, the operation report is renamed to manufacturing order summary.

Integration

  • Extended the exporttofolder command to export additional plan results into CSV or Excel files.

  • The data type of all numeric fields is changed from 15 digits with 6 decimals to 20 digits with 8 decimals. This allows a larger range of numbers to be accurately represented in the database.

  • The remote web commands API now supports user authentication with JSON Web Tokens to launch tasks, download data and upload data.

4.3.3 (2018/05/03)

Forecasting (Enterprise & Cloud Editions)

  • Bug fix: In some bucket definitions, the forecast consumption was not consuming from later buckets.

Inventory planning (Enterprise & Cloud Editions)

  • Ability to control the priority of a business rule

  • Bug fix: simulation capability in the Inventory Planning report not working when there are multiple forecasts for a single item+location forecasts.

Production planning

  • Solver performance optimization where there are availability calendars. The plan generation time can be reduced with a factor 3 to 4 in some models.

  • Solver enhancements for planning with setup matrices.

  • Solver optimization to handle infinite buffers more efficiently.

  • Bug fix: Compilation error with Python 3.6

Odoo connector

  • Correction to maintain a single root hierarchy.

Openbravo integration (Enterprise & Cloud Editions)

  • Bug fix: sales order mapping incorrectly used the document status.

  • Log file of the connector now accessible in the user interface

4.3.2 (2018/03/19)

Forecasting (Enterprise & Cloud Editions)

  • Internal refactoring of the forecastplan table.

Inventory planning (Enterprise & Cloud Editions)

  • When defining the ROQ period of cover for an item with the global_purchase flag set to true, the forecast is now based on the total demand for the item (rather than only the local demand).
    Note that the safety stock calculation remains based on the local demand for the item.

Production planning

  • New operationmaterial policy ‘transfer_batch’ which allows material production or consumption in a number of batches of fixed size at various moments during the total duration of the operationplan.
    A new field operationmaterial.transferbatch is introduced.

  • A new field ‘end items’ is added to the manufacturing order, purchase order and distribution orders screens. It is similar to the ‘demands’ which shows the demands.

  • Solver enhancements for planning with setup matrices.

API

  • Bug fix: backward compatibility after command renaming in 4.3.

Third party components

  • Upgrade to PostgreSQL 10. PostgreSQL 9.5 and 9.6 remain fully supported.

4.3.1 (2018/02/17)

Production planning

  • Solver engine improvements to reduce resource setup changeovers (Enterprise & Cloud Editions)

  • New step to make the initial work-in-progress data feasible. (Enterprise & Cloud Editions) Constraints are resolved by delaying approved manufacturing orders to feasible dates. Confirmed manufacturing orders aren’t changed during the new pre-planning step.

Forecasting (Enterprise & Cloud Editions)

  • Ability to display only 2 dimensions in the forecast editor screen.

  • Performance improvements in the export of results.

  • Improved & more intuitive values when entering forecast overrides at different levels in the hierarchies.

Bug fixes

  • The autofence now also considers approved supply, and not only confirmed supply.

  • Excel files with some non-standard internal structure are now also recognized.

  • Work-in-progress operationplans with quantity 0 are no longer rejected.

Deprecations

  • Command frepple_run is renamed to runplan.

  • Command frepple_runserver is renamed to runwebserver.

  • Command frepple_copy is renamed to scenario_copy.

  • Command frepple_importfromfolder is renamed to importfromfolder.

  • Command frepple_exporttofolder is renamed to exportfromfolder.

  • Command frepple_flush is renamed to empty.

  • Command frepple_backup is renamed to backup.

  • Command frepple_restore is renamed to restore.

  • Command frepple_simulation is renamed to simulation.

  • Command frepple_createbuckets is renamed to createbuckets.

  • Command frepple_createmodel is renamed to createmodel.

  • Command frepple_loadxml is renamed to loadxml.

  • Command frepple_runworker is renamed to runworker.