RE: Automatic Shop Order generate.

Thanks for your reply Alister.
We don't have the luxury of waiting until MRP generates at night as we try
our best to ship the same day. 

Before trying the auto shop order feature on our manufactured oils, we would
rely on the pickable sales order report to get the information as to which
items we were short on and then manually enter a shop order and hope that
all of the component items were in stock. 

After a few months of this confusion, I created a program that would list
all of the manufactured items that needed replenishment, due to demand or
below safety stock level, and then a shop order was keyed in manually for
them.

Now I am trying go to the next level and have the computer automatically
generate the shop orders as the sales orders are entered. As I stated
earlier, I am having some problems with the results.

Once a computer shop order is generated from the sales order, we have to go
to shop order maintenance, SFC500 and change the quantity to include an
additional .06 lb for the retainer sample. Next we change the flag for
pre-assign lot# to 1 for yes and then press enter.

Then we go into the shop order release program, SFC505 and select the shop
order with a 14 action and then hit F14 to print and allocate. We print out
the SFC520 document to create the blends.

We are using version 6.04 mixed mode July 98 cum.


    


-----Original Message-----
From: bpcs-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bpcs-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Alister Wm Macintyre
Sent: Friday, January 30, 2004 2:36 PM
To: SSA's BPCS ERP System
Subject: Re: Automatic Shop Order generate.

We are 405 CD Mixed Mode make-to-order
We have safety stock.
We do not have the shop orders auto generated from the sales orders.

The way safety stock works for us.
(a) there are raw materials whose lead time for us is longer than the lead 
time our customers expect from us, so MRP reorders raw materials leaving us 
with enough on-hand to handle the short lead time customers
(b) we have customers who expect us to ship to them as soon as they are 
about to run-out, so we have safety stock of their finished goods ... as 
soon as the customer supply dips below that quantity, MRP reorders to fill 
the gap

When we release the orders, it is up to us what quantity to make, so we not 
do tiny quantities, but enough to be efficient.

Now we are using simple fixed human managed safety stock values.
I have argued, and failed to convince, that we ought to be using dynamic 
safety stock around our customer seasonal needs, so as not to tie up 
company funds for inventory on parts not needed year round.
I have also argued that we ought to consider minimum order quantity policy, 
on those sub-assemblies where the setup is such that tiny orders will 
cripple us on cost.

Thus we too have multiple challenges that various people thinking about and 
suggesting solutions, that have not achieved sufficient consensus to
implement.

We also have a QC requirement to retain a tiny sample of some parts made so 
that in the event of a legal question months or years down the road, we can 
show what this or that part was like when we were making it.  The way we 
handle that is for the production people to deliberately make more than the 
shop order calls for, and through labor to report the QC excess as 
scrap.  I fear that with employee turn-over, and recession cutting into 
training dollars, that the various kinds of things supposed to be reported 
as scrap, that are not scrap, may be slipping and perhaps we need to 
rethink this and come up with some new kinds of ITE transactions and 
reporting method steps to add granularity to our scrap reporting.  It ought 
to be somewhat predictable how much of this was created, based on how many 
shop order customer order delivery date runs, so that then we can see where 
reporting fell down.

A question for you ... how fast is the shop order paperwork in your hands 
after the customer order is entered?  The way we do things we have minimum 
of 24 hour lag after customer order entered, and given the shortness of 
lead times of some customers wanting stuff from us 5 days after order 
placed, this is potentially a serious problem.

Customer Order comes in day-1
that evening I run rull generation MRP CAP and also MRP250 to spool file
every other day, production control prints that MRP250 report and uses it 
to generate needed shop orders
this means that potentially a customer order due in 5 days does not start 
production until 2 days before it is due, and it has many sub-assemblies.

Exception to this is when customer service communicates with production 
control to say that this or that item needs to be made faster than the 
normal MRP processing cycle, so shop orders are released manually, on those 
rush customer items.  This is not as efficient as doing it through MRP, so 
we cannot be doing that for lots of items.

The way you doing things, how do you get the shop paperwork off of the shop 
orders launched by customer orders ... do you automatically get SFC520 from 
them, and are this a pile of tiny print runs where you can release to print 
continuously one behind the other without printer alignment hassles on each 
batch?  Or does some person have to manually do stuff to get the shop 
paperwork on the automatically released shop orders?

Also can this be seton selectively ... only do it on the customer items 
where lead time for those customers is so short that this would be helpful?

>Hello,
>I have a couple of questions regarding the auto generation of shop orders
>from sales order entry.
>Our company has just turned this feature on, and we are having some issues
>with the process.
>
>First, it seems as though a shop order generates even if you have
sufficient
>inventory for an item. Is there a way to tell the system to only generate a
>shop order if you do not have enough material to ship?
>
>Next, we require that a retainer sample for each blend produced to be kept
>in the lab. Therefore, we must create an additional .06 lb for the
retainer.
>Is there a way to have BPCS add this quantity to the amount of the shop
>order being generated?
>
>Next, we would prefer to have the lot# pre-assigned on our shop orders.
>Currently, we are revising the shop order and changing the flag to
>pre-assign before releasing the computer generated shop order. Is there a
>setup parameter to change which will automatically set the pre-assign lot
>number flag to yes?
>
>Thank you for your help.
>Ted


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