Re: Manufacturing Cycle Times

From Al Macintyre BPCS 405 CD MM / AS400 hoping as usual that some of this is 
what you are looking for & overall me being helpful.

First - take a look at the PRF application = Performance Measurement 

We are not using it, but there has been traffic on BPCS_L from folks who do.
As I understand it, it tracks when you were supposed to do things as opposed 
to when they were actually done, some of which might be beyond your control.  
However, there is a load imposed on the complexity of managing closure of 
Shop Orders, which are complicated enough as they are.

Look at System Parameters for Purchasing Raw Materials.
You can define what is "on time" ... ours is like within 5 days to allow for 
weekends because this is not using any of the BPCS calendars ... there is 
then a BPCS report showing how your vendors have performed relative to your 
"on time" definition, which we copied & modified a bit in appearance.

Look at Shipping Documents & Shipping History files ... we have modified a 
bit in here but what you should be looking for is the date promised that 
you'd ship vs. the date you actually shipped ... you can use this to do date 
math of your internal performance of getting product out the door mirroring 
the Purchasing Report.

We also track RMA totals as a percentage of what we shipped by facility 
customer part, along with reasons.

When we run MRP, it updates Shop Orders with an MRP rescheduling date that is 
either 
all zeros means that the Shop Order due date is correct
all nines means the Shop Order ought to be cancelled
some date means MRP re-schedule when this now really due

We have copied the BPCS Shop Floor Dispatch Report & restructured appearance 
& a few things to sequence by the recomputed when MRP says it is due, then 
within work center date due, sorted by descriptive fields from IIM & FOD to 
group same kind of work adjacent.

A Gotcha to be aware of in Shop Order release if you are like us - A Make To 
Order Job Shop with volatility in Customer Due Dates & Quantities ... if you 
release Shop Orders prematurely for final assembly, then the customer due 
date changes, MRP rescheduling will ignore the Customer due dates & instead 
by driven by the due dae you put in the final assembly shop orders, with 
respect to the lower sub-assembly prioritizing.

There is a systemic bug in SSA CST reports which we have reported to the help 
line.  We use additional lines of description fairly heavily (status code 3), 
but CST270, CST600 etc. treat description lines as if they are real lines, 
instead of using FRT logical over status code 1 only, or excluding same level 
of number crunching.  We have 50 additional description lines for each 1 line 
of operation that belongs on these reports, which means SSA's vanilla reports 
are a mess.

We also do not like CST270 definition of variance ... difference between 
quantity we planned to make vs. made so far ... would much prefer difference 
between standard & actual for what was in fact made.

We sort monthly labor reporting by work center to produce a summary 
performance report of overall scrap percentage & other indicators.

We have identified serious factory bottlenecks & placed coding in unused 
fields of item master to mark those end items that at some point in their 
production go through which bottlenecks, so that reports on how we are doing 
can include whether or not that is a factor on which parts.

We use SSH SSD files to review cost of goods shipped, dollars billed, divided 
by units sold, to get profit picture by customer item, to identify items that 
have problems.

We added a SHIP FROM SHOP report that identifies what shop orders are 
unpurged for those items we are currently shipping.  Those items on past SSH 
SSD problem report that show up here get studied for labor & material flaws 
in reporting & engineering, while the shop orders involved are unpurged.

We created what we call an HOURS SCHEDULE which shows the standard time to 
produce what we have promised the customer.  This helps customer service see 
what the impact on shop floor will be by accepting order changes & it also 
helps factory management do raw budgeting of personnel hours.

Several consultants have add-ons to serve this interest. 

Crowe Chizek has a Customer Order Change History. 
In with the nitely tasks, copy ECL file to ECO file (OLD COPY), but first 
compare prior nite ECO to current ECL, and generate additions to ECG change 
history that uniquely identifies what dates got changed, quantities, prices, 
warehouse, by ECL line # & WHEN was this done.
We plan to combine this with cumulative lead times to report on customer 
order changes that are lead time violations.
We plan to combine this with date last shipped to report on first release of 
new parts (never shipped before), to give manufacturing a heads up on tooling.

ISE has Sales History Tracking that identifies trends & abnormalities for 
feed back into Forecasting

MRP Exception Reporting cries out for improvement & several BPCS consultants 
have in fact done so, but I was checking my lists & did not see name of 
product.

>  From:    gordon.coen@abbott.com (Coen,Gordon)

>  BPCS MM 6004 /AS400.

>  We are currently working on a project to improve the cycle time of our
>  products. The main source of information will be the manufacturing system
>  with the aim of producing a report which could provide a comparison of 
> actual times/dates versus scheduled times/dates. 
> We will be able to get some
>  information on actual times from labour hour reporting but it won't quite
>  meet all our needs. Has anyone else out there tried anything similar ? Is
>  there some base BPCS functionality that I have overlooked which would help 
?

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
http://www.whma.org = our nitch industry's next annual convention mid April 
will have collections of presentations focused on ERP etc. needs of our 
industry & those software providers that match those needs.
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