Re: Shop Order Days = Don't discount possibility of Bugs

E-mail from Al Macintyre at Tim's PC at work.
____________________________________________

I suggest that you send a general inquiry to SSA Help Support, or where ever
you have BPCS tech support..  Describe what you think you found.  Ask if the
program is supposed to work as described.  This may result either in SSA
saying OOPS there is a fix on OSG that you need to order, or providing you
with a copy of some OSG help clarification that weuns lack the ability to
extract for ourselves.


Stephen Wrote:

>Its Monday morning and you undoubtedly need something to jump start your
>week.  This is my first submission to the list and I am a Business Analyst,
>not a RPG programmer, so write slowly!  We are running BPCS 4.0 release 5
>and are pretty much vanilla, other than some Y2K mods (problem predates
>these mods), in this area.

I am an RPG programmer, relatively new to OS/400.  We converted to BPCS 4.0
5 CD (Y2K) 1 a year ago & have some mods.  I am covered up in mod requests
to fix preceived BPCS shortcomings in the handling of shop orders, a topic
that also may belong off-line.  I am not familiar with SFC739.

We programmers sometimes make mistakes, usually called BUGS (I forget what
this acronym stands for).

When something makes no sense, that can be a clue that something is not
right either in the data used for the number crunching or in the program
that is doing it.

It is important when discussing perceived problems that we are clear on what
exactly is being used to launch the shop orders that have the weird numbers.
We use SFC500 for exception rush orders driven by circumstances that can't
wait on the next MRP, while 95% of our shop orders are launched through MRP.
Although we use JIT to update shop orders, we don't use it to launch them.
Planned orders can be manipulated by the people who are launching them & it
is my understanding that we don't do any manipulations prior to launch, only
later, such as authorized substitutions to get around some bottleneck.  The
BPCS 405 start points for this kind of comparison are SFC500 MRP540 JIT540.

Stephen Wrote:

< snip >
>
>We have stepped through the scheduling engine (SFC739) - arduous task - and
>are very confused about something.  It would seem that as the program loops
>from one operation to the next, regardless of work center correlation, the
>hours of capacity remaining from the previous operation's work center
serves
>as the basis for the next operation's hours remaining of capacity.  Maybe I
>am completely missing something, but to my simple mind this makes no sense
>at all.

>The previous operation's work center capacity remaining is
>irrelevant to the next work center's capacity.

It is irrelevant to the next work center's work, but it is relevant to the
shop order's ability to get through each work center, when the operations
are inter-dependent.  There are cases where we are able to do operations
out-of-sequence, so that we do not have to wait on an early operation
bottle-neck, but this is the exception to the general rule.  Thus the
earlier work center should have a drag on scheduling parts that go through
it.

>Can anyone shed some light on this for me?
>Each of our work centers has a variable amount of standard
>capacity and these remainder hour quantities leave us with partial days
>which are apparently rounded up to whole days.  I think that is why we end
>up with 5 days of operation queue.

< snip >

I plan to post several e-mails addressing various aspects of this that make
sense to me.

____________________________________________
Al Macintyre
Central Industries of Indiana, Inc.
We Harness Quality
www.cen-elec.com


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