An item is a phantom when the Phantom Flag is selected on the Items form. When you run APS Planning or MRP Planning, the system bypasses the phantom item and creates planned orders only for the material components in the phantom item's current bill of material. This "blow-through" planning drives the demand straight through the phantom item to its components.
The MRP and APS systems plan phantom items differently depending on certain conditions. This topic describes these conditions and how you should control them.
Phantoms are usually subassemblies. However, if a phantom is the finished "end" item, the system plans it normally, generating any necessary planned orders for it along with the planned orders for its components.
The system plans items differently based on the combination of how you set the Phantom Flag, Accept Requirements, and Pass Requirements fields on the Planning Parameters form. See the Accept Requirements help topic for details about the relationship between these three fields.
This section applies only to APS; MRP does not allow you to use phantom inventory.
Typically, you do not stock a phantom, but it is possible to do so (for example, if you perform a Miscellaneous Receipt transaction for the phantom item). If a stocked quantity of a phantom is on hand, APS reduces the demand quantity for the phantom's material components by the amount of that stocked quantity.
EXAMPLE: Consider the usage of the phantom item "Item-2" in this bill of material:
When you run the APS Planning, the system generates a planned order normally for Item-1. But before it blows through the phantom Item-2 to plan its components, it first reduces the component demand quantity by Item-2's on-hand quantity of 5. So, instead of planning a demand of 20 for Item-2a and Item-2b, it plans for 15.
When you firm a planned order for an item that has a phantom in the current BOM, and the system uses the phantom's inventory to reduce the component demand, the phantom item is NOT added to the production BOM for the resulting job or production schedule. Instead, the Planned Phantom Usage form appears and prompts you to add the phantom item to the job or production schedule; this gives you control over whether to add the phantom to the production BOM. You can add the phantom to the production BOM or not, depending on your company's processes.
If you want the phantom to be used in the production BOM, you must add it as a material on the job or production schedule BOM. After adding the phantom to the BOM, you must reduce the demand quantity by adjusting the Qty/Per field for the phantom and its components. The example below describes how to do this.
EXAMPLE: Consider this current routing/BOM:
To adjust the production BOM for this example, follow these steps:
NOTE: If you do not plan to adjust the BOM for phantom usage after firming the planned order, you should not firm the planned orders for the phantom's component materials (Item-2a and Item-2b). Otherwise, it would be OK to do so.
The Planner has suggested adding phantom item [Item: Item-2] for [Quantity: 4.00000000] to Job that has [Job: 163] and [Suffix: 0] and [Operation: 10].