Jerk Around my Brain

e-mail from Al Macintyre at Tim's PC at work

I have received a modification request & my mind is a bit blank regarding
the best way to tackle this.  Can anyone suggest some good file(s) to
target, & any gotchas that I might have overlooked, for the following
scheme?

We are a make-to-order job-shop running 405 CD mixed mode on AS/436.

Many customers call us with very short lead times & the sales dept is
supposed to consult with manufacturing regarding the doability of customer
pull-ups, but even with consultation, doability is often considered in
isolation from other customer pull-ups, where they want something sooner
than might seem reasonable, so manufacturing needs a "big picture" report to
monitor net changes in customer driven requirements for visibility of where
MRP changed priorities came from.  Also some personnel in manufacturing do
not exactly trust their counterparts in customer service to properly
communicate changes in customer orders.

The EC* customer order files get a lot of the "jerking around" --- customer
changes date due & quantity due & customer service changes the actual order
to show what the customer NOW wants.  Shipping makes a mistake & billing
updates customer orders incorrectly & customer service changes the actual
customer orders to show what is needed to be done now to fulfil customer
needs.

The modification request is to copy some file of a customer requirements as
of some date & time, like into a work member named after the user who does
this & it would be nice if that date-time vintage was easily accessible by
the end-user who might forget the last time they made this copy.  Then at
some future time, which might be a few days later, or the same time a week
later, we run some report that compares the latest requirements file with
the earlier copy, printing net changes in the customer orders, arranging
according to some MRP calendar to put the data into buckets such as by week.

Zero on the report = no change in the customer requirements on this
customer-item-facility combination
Plus = new business added since the prior snapshot, such as lead time
violated at time of customer order, and valid additions
Minus = Order was killed or moved away

We don't want changes due to normal billing of orders shipped leading to
customer order no longer active to distort this net requirement changes
picture, so I was thinking of using EC* records (complete) active &
inactive, except the reason for inactive at time of original capture vs.
reason for inactive in week later comparison needs careful thought, to give
them the picture they really want.

I am lost on how long inactive EC* records have retention.

A related report is short term comparison for customer order entry person
with a complex set of changes to enter on existing customer orders & wants
to see the net effect of their session's keying to confirm it agrees with
what they intended to do.  In theory we do not have multiple cooks
simultaneously mucking in the same customer.

We have not been using the MRP or CAP simulation features yet.

So can anyone give me any suggestions where to start on this?

Thanks

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


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