Re: Making an item obsolete, yet allow transactions. -- BPCS-L

Is there a way to flag an item, perhaps in IIM or CIC that would not allow the item to be used on a PO or Shop Order, but allow consumption of the remaining product, and allow the item to be transacted upon?

Jim

Here are several ideas.

Take a look at the function of effectivity dates, and how BPCS tracks variances within individual orders, so that you can do substitutions that are outside the standard engineering.

We change the item class when an item becomes inactive in ONE facility, but still active in ANOTHER. We change item class again when it becomes inactive in ALL facilities. This inactivity sometimes occurs because of engineering changes in our customer parts, or what all needed for customer model lines. This coding makes it easier for many users to see which materials can safely be moved across facilities, and which need to be sold to other companies in our business.

We have several reports that show the $ value of our inventory based on combination of facility warehouse and item class. Thinking through this just helped me identify a possible problem with our inventory costs ... Item Class controls where costs go into General Ledger ... when we change an item class in our engineering and inventory, I betcha the General Ledger does not get informed as to the shift in valuation.

We also convert into common part #s those sub-assemblies for one or more customers parts, in which they are physically identical. The old engineering then gets an item class change to designate that it is obsolete, and one of the fields points to the replacement item #. The replaced item #s inventory is restated in inventory records as the replacement part, and hopefully the physical labeling also.

We place phantoms in our BOM to label Engineering Change History, so that anyone looking at BOM can see the history of Engineering Changes that have affected this item. That means that the ECs show up in SFC300, but no transactions get posted to them. I guess, that one thing you could do is to change engineering on the items in question, so that they become phantoms in the official BPCS engineering MBM file, while they remain valid for transactions out of the FMA on existing orders. An idea to test before implementing.

BPCS does not do anything different with the parts. If it merely a tip off to our users what they supposed to be doing with items on basis of item class.

- Al Macintyre http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac Find BPCS Documentation Suppliers http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html

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