Re: Data Mapping -- BPCS-L

There are any number of packages out there. I not want to explore much detail, in any one package, beyond my prior answers in case these packages are not a direction that interests you.

Does this scenario strike a nerve ... you enter customer orders where you promise to send the parts to the customer on date X, and date X rolls around and it does not go out on time. Come to find out there is a bottleneck making some sub-assembly for lack of some component that you had plenty of at some other facility. Had you only known about this a few days earlier, the part could have gone out on the date promised to the customer. People in the company knew about this, but there is just so much data in BPCS. Well there is an add on package that looks at your customer orders, purchase orders, shop orders, resupply orders etc. and identifies the bottlenecks and their consequences ... tell customer service in advance which orders will not ship out on time, and why ... tell production control what the consequences will be of not solving this bottleneck promptly.

Lots of posts here about automating some tasks ... what parameters to feed in. There's at least one package out there to manage all of that ... automate any BPCS steps, add artificial intelligence to deal with the unexpected.

We have had any number of posts where some field gets corrupted intermittently, and there are lots of clues, places to look, and you could journal log the field, but this can be so tedious. You can get an add on package where you specify what field(s) you want to track, such as in customer orders the price, profit center, company number ... and then you later can access inquiry or report on who all changed that stuff using what program ... BPCS program or something else. So a new problem starts to develop ... turn on what field you want to track in addition to the others. If I have heard the complaint once, I have heard it a hundred times ... the price on this item got changed by mistake, we know not now the circumstances, and we did not find out until 6 months later that we had been short changing ourselves on this item.

Sometimes some people want to look at ancient data, but that is exception to performance trade-off, so there are various archiving products to make easy access to ancient BPCS data, while improving BPCS performance astronomically. Some tasks that now take many hours, will now run in a few minutes.

Does it sometimes seem a bit tedious how to get customer order data into BPCS? Seems like every customer wants a different way to deliver the data to us ... go to their web site, and no two are structured the same ... get the data electronically and no two do it the same way ... get data via fax and no two are formatted alike There can be humongous volume of human keying to transcribe all this into BPCS, and it is urgent to get it done fast because of shorter lead times Because of the time pressure, and data volume, there is then a risk of human error, not spotted in time Well there is an add on product that will automate all of that ... no matter web site designs, fax formats ... so long as the data is being transcribed from one place, such as fax came to PC screen, to another place, such as ORD500 input then your staff can focus on the exceptions, and on real customer service

Managing BPCS is a team effort by many people, each of whom know only part of a very big picture. We can have team members who are omitting data in some key fields because of a lapse in their training ... e.g. items ordered for customers ought to be master scheduled items, items manufactured through JIT600 should have operation at which they are to be issued ... people omit that stuff, and you do not know it until your inventory is all screwed up. There's software that was developed during Y2K conversions that look at the pattern of your data and find stuff that violates your patterns.

BPCS Security can be rather obtuse. How do you know it is setup correctly? You can get a software package to not only manage BPCS Security settings more sensibly that out of the box, but also inspect your 400 Security settings also for risks.

In e-commerce UCC_NET and now RFID, dirty data can really hurt you, and there are so many places that you can have it. Managing your data for success in new technologies can overwhelm the in-house staff, but there are packages to help solve all of the above.

On a limited budget, one has to identify which of these areas is the biggest bang for the buck, most useful to your company.

Al Mac