Re: Planning (was Help) -- BPCS-L

from Al Macintyre

we have BPCS 405 CD & may be able to help you with some of this or make some 
suggestions
we have 4 facilities & we do most stuff by facility, not global.
we also do not have sufficiently accurate work center data to rely heavily 
upon CAP but according to APICS standards you have to have accuracy in the 
high 90 percentiles for all of this to work.

How many people are on your project team & how many of them have received 
some kind of formal ERP training?  When we implemented BPCS we had approx 30 
clerical staff people & supervisors in the whole enterprise & 10 of them were 
on the BPCS project team & all 10 got formal ERP training from our BPCS 
consultants.

What is your percentage accuracy for bill of material & routings?

If it is not very good, then MPS & MRP will plan the wrong stuff for the 
wrong times & when you report labor & inventory transactions against your 
shop orders, the wrong stuff will be consumed & you will run out of materials 
that the MPS & MRP planned for but were given wrong engineering data, and you 
will end up with a small fortune invested in inventory that you do not need, 
which was purchased because of requirements generated by errors in your 
engineering.

In traditional free enterprise capitalism, with no government subsidies, this 
can mean bankrupsy.

You will have promised a customer that something will be shipped on a 
specific date then 1 week before it is due to be finished you will discover 
you are out of some essential raw materials that take 2 months to replenish 
... and all this happens because your engineering data is not accurate enough 
for MPS MRP to work, so you have to invest an astronomical amount of money in 
just-in-case safety stock, and hire a large crew of inventory cycle counters, 
that would not be neccessary if you had accurate supporting data.

We have some accuracy problems here ... the way we are focusing on trying to 
fix it is
1. reports off of SS* & ITH sales & shipping history files that capture 
standard cost at time of shipping & what we billed the customer to show big 
variation between actual & standard cost & what the price was.
2. at time of shipment / billing, connect SI* invoice detail file to what FSO 
shop orders are still open on the items we just shipped.
3. focus in on the data that CST270 uses to see why the standard & actual are 
way off, only on the shop orders in step 2 that have been a habitual problem 
in step 1.

In traditional free enterprise capitalism, not solving this kind of problem 
can mean the customer takes the business to our competition, or we end up 
keeping the customers we are losing money on & losing the customers we had 
excessive profit on.

BPCS shop orders, by default, do not care about inventory, only about labor 
reporting against our routings ... as soon as the routing requirements are 
satisfied, BPCS thinks it is time to close out that shop order as complete 
... so if your BOM is dead bang accurate & your routings are useless, the 
useless routings will sabotage access to your accurate BOM.  This is one 
reason we prefer to report via JIT600 rather than SFC600 ... it reports 
inventory & labor at the same time, so when the routings claim the job is 
done, all the inventory hopefully is also done.

we run MRP500 then MRP600 every nite full regeneration each facility
we sometimes run them in the middle of the day if lots of relevant activity
we run CAP500 and CAP600 semi-weekly ... the scheduling is not reliable, due 
to our inability to define capacity properly, but the lists of work still to 
be done at each work center is very useful.

We think of MPS then MRP as gathering up all the information from all kinds 
of orders, inventory, and engineering rules, then making reccommendations 
based on the assumption that the whole thing is reasonably accurate.

We have customer orders for finished product.
We have shop orders for manufacturing.
We have purchase orders for raw materials.
We have resupply orders for inter-facility transfers.

There is a releasable orders report for production orders ... MRP250 I think
It tells us what we ought to release based on what is needed & what we have 
the raw materials to actually build.  It does not do such a swell job with 
WIP that will be produced at the same time as the next sub-assembly the WIP 
goes into.

Warning, if you have customers that change their requirements between placing 
orders & getting them completed - do not release shop orders on end items 
prematurely.
MPS & MRP start off by scheduling stuff based on customer order requirements, 
then if those requirements are "satisfied" by shop orders released against 
them, lower items in the product structure will be scheduled based on what is 
needed for the end items you released.
So now the end customer order gets changed ... they need the part 2 weeks 
sooner, so the exception report says that the shop[ order needs to be pulled 
up 2 weeks sooner but says nothing about the lower parts ... they seem to be 
Ok because they are being built to the original date of the shop order that 
needs to be pulled up , but they are not Ok.
... you can go crazy with shop order maintenance getting the shop order dates 
to agree with MRP reccomendations ... better not to release the shop orders 
until a few days before you need to do the work & avoid the hassle.
Then the only people who need to sweat the MRP reschedule dates are 
purchasing department & work center supervisors.

There is a work center dispatch report SFC230 I think, that talks about 
requirements from the perspective of what's coming soon, what is ready to 
start, what we started on ... we created a modification of this to show 
what's left to do & how soon the MRP says we need it finished.

You really ought to get your hands on decent BPCS documentation.
I reccommend Unbeaten Path & DSlicker for starters

http://www.unbeatenpathintl.com/services.html

I can send you the table of contents via attached to e-mail of the BPCS 
reference manual from DS Solutions if you are interested.  We have not yet 
purchased a copy.

DS Solutions, Inc.
P.O. Box 304
Mequon, WI 53092

Phone:  (414) 512-9035
Email:  dslic@aol.com

There's also a few places that publish BPCS newsletters.
We subscribe to Nex Gen (quarterly ... wonderful articles that focus in on 
how to really use one application or another to its full potential ... some 
time I mean to go after a full set of back issues), 
Iquest (semi-annual I think ... basically a BPCS consultant that is listing 
neat stuff they have done for other BPCS clients & we look at the list & 
drool wishing we could afford that also) and 
Crowe Chizek (monthly mixture of news of what SSA claims to be up to next, 
and talking about solutions to common BPCS needs)

While you are waiting for your official BPCS Manuals to arrive from other 
than the regular SSA suppliers, check out what passes for documentation that 
comes with BPCS.  Via a BPCS user who has security authorization to SYS 
functions, get to the DOC menu ... you will have to reset the index & then 
you can go in & look at lots & lots of lovely detail that could use indexing, 
but if you know SEU, you can scan for various strings of relevant information.

Some of this documentation talks about sequence in which you need to 
implement stuff ... an individual application will say ... before you 
implement me ... you have to implement those other guys.  This is not just 
sequence of loading files, it is also getting those other guys like 95% 
accurate.

This is all in English ... I do not know what BPCS documentation is in other 
languages.
http://www.atlt.com/public/bpcs-utl00.html is in French

> Subj:  Help
>  From:    fupingren@yeah.net (Ren Fu Ping)
>  
>  Dear Heyer and All,
>  
>      I have serveral question about implenmenting MPS and MRP in BPCS
>  V6.0.02 on the below,  Would you help me to solve it.
>     In our company, we have awful routing data and work centre
>  information, so we can't implenment
>  CAP module. but we have to implenment MPS and MRP. now the problem is:
>      A. I need only MRP report through creating shop order for Finished
>  Goods and WIP material directly instead of MPS generation . is it
>  feasible ? according to my comprehension, MPS report is only a
>  production plan to support PMC planner,through MPS output result is an
>  MRP input, but in fact, MPS output is an group and calculation of sales
>  order and forcast order. so, premise of running MRP is not MPS
>  output,but sales order and forcast order, is it correct?
>      B. how many options set up in BPCS to output an right MRP report.
>  only the following list and requirment is recongized by me.any
>  supplement is very appreciate.
>          The Key Item Master Information: Order Policy, Lead time,
>  Manufacture flag, production rates,planner code,buyer code,vendor code.
>          accurate outstanding sales order is required;
>          accurate bill of material is required;
>          accurate outstanding purchase order;
>          accurate inventory data.
>  
>  Thanks for your advise.
>  F.P. Ren
>  IT & Project Supervisor
>  China
>  Email: fupingren@yeah.net

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

+---
| This is the BPCS Users Mailing List!
| To submit a new message, send your mail to BPCS-L@midrange.com.
| To subscribe to this list send email to BPCS-L-SUB@midrange.com.
| To unsubscribe from this list send email to BPCS-L-UNSUB@midrange.com.
| Questions should be directed to the list owner: dasmussen@aol.com
+---