Question about Purchase lead time and work order lead times. I have a situation where an outsourced work order takes 175 days to complete. I am also purchasing components for that work order that take however my components do not need to be there until day 115 for the vendor to complete work. How do I get valid purchase signals out of MRP for both the component level and for the work order level based on lead time? I would have thought lead time offset with a negative number but this doesn't work

The challenge is that NetSuite considers the start date of the routing step (if using WIP/Routings) or Work Order to be the drop dead date for the purchased good to arrive. My first inclination would be to test if there are ways to create a child work order or a separate routing step accommodating those lead times.

I did come up with a hideous method of wrapping the component in a higher level assembly (kind of what you suggested) but it didn't seem manageable. In the end I am going to overcome this with data. I put a field on the item record for outsourced work order lead time and then created a dataset/workbook to calculate the work order release date. This will work for us for now since we manage only a small number of outsource manufactured goods (though they are complex in nature) Unfortunately with outsourced mfg you can't use wip so lose the ability to time the arrival of components to the vendor.