Re: quirky things in shipping jobs

We have had problems with too many cooks poorly communicating with each 
other.  

People who want to do ORD500 maintenance to an order that is in the midst of 
shipping picking but not completed, are told by the system about the status 
of the order, then they are given the option to over-ride, and this can screw 
up the order codes.  This is a case of inadequate tools provided for 
clean-up, and the over-ride needs to have some special password that is 
changed regularly.

The really bad thing about this was that the sales dept people did not 
communicate with the shipping depts to find out who was trying to ship that 
order, so they did not know why their shipment effort got mysteriously 
corrupted, & it would be nice if BPCS did a better job of intercommunicating 
that kind of information, or there were tools to ask - what work station 
member is it that is in the middle of that task & who was the last user of 
that member.

Another scenario is related to us being a make-to-order job shop.  Billing is 
done once per day when all the shipping for the day at all locations has been 
completed & all the people in the shipping departments stay out of shipping 
application until the accounting department is done with Billing.  This is 
managed by verbal communications & the AS/400 MSG function.  This works 
satisfactorily.

But we also have a phenomena I call "The expedite army" which is a small task 
force that walks a customer emergency order through the factory as fast as is 
humanly possible, chain gang drafting neccessary work force as needed & not 
always getting the paperwork done right.  Fortunately this army is usually in 
the reserves & rarely on active duty.

One time the army arrived at shipping & it was deserted of personnel, because 
shipping was done for the day, except for some stuff that they were taking to 
the airport & not back yet, so the army followed the manual, except they 
missed a step & the step they missed was communication with accounting, which 
happened to be running billing right at that instant.  So that shipment got 
royally screwed up.

Al
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