Good grower software should help you accomplish your tasks as a grower. One of those tasks is recording and maintaining the right steps (or operations) and resources that you use to create or manufacture a given item you sell.

Traditional Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software systems, Sage X3 included, provide mechanisms for maintaining these operational step records and the associated resources needed in each manufacturing step. These types of records are generally called routings. They provide mechanisms to define, track and cost the manufacturing process.

With the help of these records, you can define, schedule, and cost all your detailed operations like:

• Production Labor.
• Growth Cycle.
• Water and Chemical Application.
• Inventory Movement and Spacing Labor.
• Inventory Pull Labor. Etc…….

What is a SageX3 Routing Record

The routing record in SageX3 is a powerful concept and, as with many powerful things, it comes with complexity.

According to SageX3 the routing record:

“defines the formalized of the steps required for a manufactured product (finished or semi-finished). It also provides a description of the various operations and activities in the production process as well as the sequencing of operations to be completed”

In different terms, a routing record specifies:

• the specific operations need to create an item
• the individual work centers that need to be used
• mechanisms and values for calculating and booking costs including allocated costs.

Why Growers Care About a SageX3 Routing Record

For Growers who use SageX3, the routing mechanism is a powerful concept that can be used to describe the production line resources, operations and runtime values for manufacturing and costing their items.

Thus, for some types of growers, especially those using various costing allocations, the SageX3 routing records become crucial to getting the costing calculated correctly.

Routing Records Require a Lot of Data

The routing mechanism gives the grower a large amount of control and granularity in specifying how a particular item is created and costed but there are a lot of data elements required.

Growers who manufacture a lot of different items at multiple facilities with potentially different cost factors will need to create and maintain a lot of routing records.

Simple Small Example

Let’s say a grower has a total of 1,500 finished good items they manufacture at 3 different facilities where they track inventory by location.

If that grower has routings defined that use 5 operational steps for manufacture and or costing, then you are looking at:

               1,500 items * 3 sites * 5 operations = 22,500 routing detail (ROUOPE) records

And there are dozens of fields in the form for each row.

Some Lessons We Have Learned

For the work, we have done with larger growers, and specifically, in setting up routing records, there are some key takeaways that we have gained through this experience.

Lesson 1: Use Automation to Handle the Sage X3 Routing Record Complexity

The routing detail record allows you to capture runtime information (which helps calculate and book costs) as well as work operation and work centers – the machines or areas where work will be done. Each combination of work center and operation requires a routing detail record.

The routing detail records (ROUOPE) have dozens of fields available to control the routing execution. Complex routings can be cumbersome to enter.

SageX3 provides an interface for entering this data. But for large numbers of routings or highly complex routings, it is tedious and error prone to hand enter and slow.

SageX3 provides an upload mechanism where routing text file renderings can be uploaded. This is a much better way than hand entering however the format is multiline records and tedious to type. However, due to the amount of detail and the rigorous formatting requirements of the data manually generated these files is also difficult.

To help our SageX3 clients we have built a template driven routing record generation engine. The template engine allows us to quickly configure and define the necessary configuration of a given routing record setup.

Once the AGS software and template engine is properly configured and setup for your installation, the automation allows us to take a list of client items (as long as they have the required background records setup) and automatically scan (read) the database for key necessary values and build the output files that define the routing records into a suitable Sage X3 upload data format.

Then, with the correctly defined sage upload template, you can upload all those routing records saving untold hours of staff time. This alone can take weeks of staff activity and compress it to an afternoon.

Lesson 2: Use Audits of Sage X3 routing runtimes for Accuracy checking

The routing runtimes can play a huge role in costing depending on your individual costing setup. In cases where runtime values are coupled with the costing dimensions for the site to calculate actual cost values for each work center (or for allocated costs) it is crucial to have accurate data.

The routing runtime accuracy is important and for some operations, you may want decimal accuracy to 4 or 5 decimal places so that small values will be represented. Again, these types of updates are very tedious in even Excel much less the Sage X3 routing record user interface that is required for the routing operations. Plus, out of the box, Sage does not logically auto calculate these runtime values based on specific product information. So, a grower is relying on manual calculation and maintenance of a very important product costing value across thousands or hundreds of thousands of records.

Since routing records can be manipulated by hand, or copied from other routings, errors can creep in.

To help growers detect and correct these errors we have built auditing routines that extend our routing generator to check against the fundamental database content to make sure a particular routing record has runtime values that are accurate. Our systems can flag those in error, based on your configuration and needs, and provide reports in emails and we can even automatically correct if so configured.

Lesson 3: Use automation to handle the Volume

Our client base includes several growers with more than 10,000 active finished goods defined. For those growers on Sage X3 with multiple production/inventory sites and with just a few routing runtime values per item there would be hundreds of thousands of records to build/maintain, audit, and evolve over time as your business changes.

For one of our larger clients, the initial Sage X3 GO-LIVE data load for their initial defined routing record architecture generated over 750,000 routing record lines.

If a staff member can create a new routing detail record every 30 seconds on average that equates to over 6,200 hours of staff time. If you paid your staff the minimum wage in some areas of the U.S. of $15 / hour, that equates to $93,750 of salary expense. And, based on our experience, growers typically don’t use minimum wage resources for data of this complexity and importance.

Certainly, there are ways to copy records to speed that activity but even with that there is still an enormous cost of human labor to generate records of this complexity.

With appropriate logging and reporting, good automation can handle volume like this in small amounts of time. This helps the grower staff focus their efforts on the things that are most important saving a grower lots of time and money with manual data entry.

Lesson 4: Use Batching to reduce the potential failure surface

For a larger, multi-facility grower, the sheer volume of routing records can lead to very large uploads.

In the above example, the sheer size of the initial upload attempt caused timeout failures.

While the Sage X3 upload system is flexible and powerful it has its limits.

To deal with upload errors and timeouts we added a batch creation feature whereby we can specify the goal size of the upload files generated.

In this way, we were able to generate smaller groups of routing records accurately and automatically as part of a larger generation activity. These smaller record count batches are then uploaded independently without the risk of timeouts or other failures causing rework.

Lesson 5: Use the right level of granularity on runtime value generation

Many growers sell to retails that provide retailer specific SKUs. In many cases, several manufactured items could be used for a given SKU.

For example, if a particular retailer has a SKU for ‘Small Annuals’ (it happens!)  there literally could be dozens of specific items with some variation in sizing used to fulfill that SKU that the grower could manufacture. Note: Many of the larger retailers are moving toward a more specific SKU definition.

In a case like this, for some growers, specific and detailed individual item costing and runtimes are necessary. This would represent the lowest level of granularity in generating run time values. Thus, depending on the setup, each item may have some different values for routing runtime values.

Other growers may want to normalize runtime values at a higher grouping level such as Size-Genus or SKU or SKU Group for example. In this case you would have to do some normalization math across the items under the grouping level and once the math is done you would use the normalized values in generating the routing runtime values.

We have added a feature to do just this normalization operation so that for growers we can accommodate multiple scenarios of runtime value generation depending on their operational needs.

Conclusion

Correctly applied automation can complement systems with complex functionality like Sage X3 and help growers who use it achieve a better return on their investment.

AGS staff and tools have saved clients thousands of hours of labor and helped them accelerate the adoption and accuracy of their routings.

Sage X3 routings are tedious and tricky but very powerful if implemented correctly.

Contact us to discuss how we can help you with your routing implementation.

AGS works alongside your Sage X3 value added reseller to complement their Sage X3 implementation resources.