Re: Mould-Tooling&BOM

>  From:    bbutler@usf.com.au
>   
>  We are a medium to large company who specialises in open casting 
> Polyurethane
>  products. We are currently running BPCS Ver. 6.0.0.44 and we are not yet
>  utilising any of the Capacity programs. We have in our Bill Of Materials a
>  drawing number with a quantity of zero and also the remaining materials 
> needed
>  to produce product. Is there some way we could add a certain mould into the
>  B.O.M. with a value of zero (non-inventory no issues needed) yet still 
> enable us
>  to see in Materials Status that this mould is allocated to a shop order.
>  
>  Regards
>                   Bruce

We use a variety of products, including Mold Tooling Applicators, in our 
production process in which the tooling does not get consumed by the shop 
order, but it needs to clearly be identified so that people can see that what 
is involved for setup & also there is an issue of this tooling being rather 
expensive ... we have several copies of tooling that can do the same thing, 
but we do not want to have excess in inventory beyond our immediate needs, 
without at the same time causing a bottleneck where we cannot do production 
properly for lack of the right equipment.

We solve this various ways in BPCS 405 CD.

Our shop orders print a field from item master that identifies what tooling 
is needed to make the product.  Our routings also give some detail when 
neccessary & our routing additional description (status 3) print on our shop 
orders.  Thus, our factory floor people have all the information needed for 
setup & proper production.  They are getting this information from the 
routings & what prints on shop orders, not BOM.

We also have things like this in our BOM as a PHANTOM, so people can see from 
various BPCS inquiry where all tooling is USED, without this causing any 
disruption to MRP.  As our product mix fluctuates due to new cusomers, new 
orders, customer model changes, engineering changes, we can see using vanilla 
BPCS, where all our tooling is needed in current production, and whether we 
have excess capacity of tooling, or some kind of bottleneck.

Since the same stuff is mentioned by us in both BOM & Routings, there is a 
periodic discussion topic of how to verify we have no typing errors ... some 
way to have the routings mention of specific parts be matched with BOM to 
make sure anything mentioned in routings for usage is in fact in that part's 
BOM.  We deal with this by using standards of phraseiology in the routings 
that are subject to easy substringing by a skilled query/400 guru, so that we 
can in fact get lists of stuff in routings that should be in BOM but are not, 
and vica versa.

BOM & Routings are basically showing factory people what tooling is needed to 
do the job, and showing management & supervisory staff where our tooling is 
being used.  We do use BPCS Capacity Planning, but not for purposes of 
managing tooling, rather for purposes of factory productivity & budgeting 
personnel needs, because we can see in advance how many people hours needed 
in various factory floor departments, leading to authorization of over time 
in the short term, and hiring more people in the long term, or in slack time 
going to a 4 day week.

We have also setup a special item class for mold tooling & done a 
modification to our shop order reporting, so we capture number of machine 
cycles per mold applicator tooling use, and this feeds into preventative 
maintenance of our tooling.

It may be that what works for us is too unsophisticated for your needs.  I 
know that what we setup years ago is something we are now outgrowing, as in 
my to-do pile are several modification requests to expand on this area.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)
AS/400 Data Manager & Programmer for BPCS 405 CD Rel-02 mixed mode (twinax 
interactive & batch) @ http://www.cen-elec.com Central Industries of 
Indiana--->Quality manufacturer of wire harnesses and electrical 
sub-assemblies - fax # 812-424-6838

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