Re: V6002 - MM - Mar Cum - CST600 question

[MacWheel99@xxxxxxx]

From Al Macintyre - 405 CD - MM - Rel-2 & some Y2K BMRs

Incidentally, it took us many many months to gain an understanding of what is 
going on with BPCS costs, and we still struggle with such topics as

what causes negative costs in previous levels

when the actual cost is humongous variation vs. standard cost, how do we 
track down why

how is accounting going to account for WIP costs in the General Ledger?

when end users are given task of reconciling costs for inter-facility 
components & costs are way off, how do they know what to do

how come there are so many labor tickets that cannot be entered & what impact 
does that have on our accuracy

no human can process those 25,000 page BPCS cost analysis reports, but there 
is data there we need to process - how can we extract just what we need

> From: Mrogers@miwheel.com (Micki Rogers/MiWheel)

>  Not sure what you mean when you say that CST600 also rolls old items?

Your original question had asked about using CST600 to roll new items, so I 
thought I would mention what seemed to be a gap in your understanding of what 
is really going on - now BPCS V6 may have options not available in lower 
versions, but in V 405 CD it is all or nothing ... for all items in the 
CST600 selection ranges - facility - cost set - item - they get rolled 
whether they are new items or old items, but only in the facilities which 
have corresponding CIC records .... this is important to us because the basis 
for our costs change ... we figure out cheaper ways to make sub-assemblies, 
the costs of material change, usually up, there are engineering changes.

>  Regarding the CIC activity.  Are you saying that new items must be in CIC
>  in order to get rolled properly?

Yes ... CIC drives the selection of CST600 to update CMF.
If an item is not in CIC, it will not get its cost rolled period.
Records can be added to CIC manually via MRP140
CIC is like a facility-specific IIM created at the time of activity for that 
item that would require MRP action, such as the entry of a customer order, or 
inventory transaction.
If you enter routings & BOM on some new item, and have no customer order, 
inventory transaction, other kind of order on it, then there will be no CIC 
record, and cost roll ups will ignore the item.

We have had some problems with people doing transactions in the wrong 
facility, because their remembered keys filters were not set right & they did 
not notice - this leads to CIC record there - this means cost gets rolled 
there - this generally goes undiscovered until we are trying to delete 
obsolete items & need to track down all the places there are records on an 
item.

Incidentally if you do not manually add to CIC & just wait until transactions 
occur that would require MRP to add CIC naturally, then the first 
transactions will occur at zero cost because CMF has not been populated 
because CIC did not exist when you last did CST600 ... it is a chicken & egg 
question of how often you do cost roll-ups.

If you do the engineering for new items & do not add CIC record, then cost 
roll-ups will ignore those items.  Then when there are customer orders, shop 
orders, inventory transactions, shipments, the costs on that activity will 
all be zero, because CMF has not yet been populated by a cost roll up, 
because your cost roll-ups ignored those items until they had a CIC record.

This is why we run CST600 several nites a week.
We run it for all items range, different facilities different nites, standard 
cost TWO

If you are running CST600 for new items and selecting item range based on 
what the new items are, then I suspect you need to run that report that lists 
items with zero costs to see if you have been missing new items if you did 
CST600 before they had any MRP activity, then missing old items because they 
were not in the item range selected.

That's in V 405 CD ... V6 might work a little differently.

>  In our case, we created a 'working' cost set(33) for 'frozen standard' and
>  then at the end of 1999 copied cost set 33 to cost set 3.   Now, after 3
>  months, we compare cost set 33 to 3 and have seen changes in set 3.
>  We run CST600 on new items only for cost set 3 and always single-thread the
>  jobs.

We have several single-threaded JOBQ - as stated by Rick Warren (thanks Rick) 
if 2 or more people are running CST600 at the same time, irrespective of JOBQ 
threads or on-line, this can cause serious problems.  Perhaps this calls for 
a modification.

Does CL have an "IF ACTIVE" condition like OCL/36 had?

What we might want is to alter CST600C to say "If anyone else is running 
CST600 right now, then block the execution of this one" but I would not want 
to hold up a JOBQ.

At Central there are policies associated with the running of jobs known to 
have serious performance impact, like MRP in middle of work day, in which the 
person doing it is supposed to consult with co-workers to let them know that 
AS/400 performance will be impaired until this particular job completes, but 
we have not been following them religiously.

Perhaps we need a policy regarding CST600 ... certain people are supposed to 
run it at certain times ... any exceptions ... please first notify all the 
people who usually run it, to make sure that no two people have it going at 
the same time.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
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