Re: JIT - Just in Time -- BPCS-L

Hi Sony ... we are now on BPCS 405 CD mixed mode AS/400 & we are using PART 
of the JIT (Just in Time) module & MOST of the SFC(Shop Floor Control) module 
& many other modules such as INV MRP etc.  In 1998 we converted to this 
reality from BPCS/36 which did not have a JIT module.

Our reason for starting with the JIT module had to do with labor & inventory 
reporting..  When shop floor transactions are reported, there are several 
ways that BPCS supports to get the transactions inputed to the system.

You can use bar coding through CIM or other options in later versions of 
BPCS.  We currently are not using this option due to some management 
perceptions that we hire people based on their skill doing their job 
assignment & entering labor transactions through any means is not what we 
hire shop floor people for ... we want them to enter the minimum detail on 
the labor tickets, so that from a time consumption basis they spend several 
hours doing the production & less than a minute reporting that work on the 
labor ticket, & then have a clerical person, who has been hired based on 
clerical skills, get that data into the system.

If we ever went to bar coded input of labor tickets, it would be for the 
purpose of saving us the considerable time expended every day by clerical 
personnel at each facility entering transactions.  However, when there is a 
reporting problem on the paperwork, we know that our clerical person catches 
them & something gets done about those tickets pretty promptly.  We do not 
know enough about bar coded input realities to trust that the same kind of 
intelligence would be there, that obviously is not in SFC600 or JIT600.

On BPCS/36 we had a front end to convert the minutes to decimal hours & there 
is a request for me to do a modification to have that again in BPCS 405 CD.  
I found in the documentation where there is a work around way to enter 
minutes & have the system convert to decimal but production control informed 
me that this is not convenient for them to use & too much of a hassle, what 
they want is to be able to key minutes to screen then do a command key that 
would convert the minutes entry to decimal hours, or have a conversion in the 
program so that they key minutes, but decimal hours goes into the data & if 
they doing later maintenance to labor ticket, it would convert their input 
back to minutes onto the screen.

You can enter the labor transactions via SFC600 series, and the inventory 
transactions via INV500 & other inventory programs, which is how we did it 
for many years on BPCS/36.

You can write a modification so that you only do one side of this & the 
modification figures out the rest.  On BPCS/36 we had a modification that 
looked at labor history from SFC620 & figured "they made this .... so 
therefore according to the BOM (FMA) they must have used those materials ... 
so generate a transaction to consume them"  We used this approach for many 
years when the management philosophy was that getting this data into the 
system was an enormous chore & any labor saving device was justifiable.  

But then there came a time that inventory accuracy rose in importance & the 
recognition that our shop floor reporting contained intolerable levels of 
inaccuracy.  They accepted the labor inaccuracy, but wanted to fix the 
inventory inaccuracy, so we quit using the backflushing inventory from labor 
history automated input program, except for scrap reporting, and the regular 
production inventory transactions were to be done by a materials handling 
person who counted what was manufactured to ensure a more accurate input ... 
at that time in BPCS/36 the program was SFC570 I believe.

Today, both inventory accuracy & labor accuracy are critically important to 
our management & we are adding analytical reports to nail down where our 
efficiencies & reporting problems are & where we have inaccuracies in our 
engineering data.

It seems to me that most of our standard vs. actual cost variances are in the 
labor reporting rates.  If the standard says they should be able to do 60 an 
hour & the labor reporting says they are doing 20 an hour, then the actual 
labor & overhead cost will be 3 times the standard & this also has an impact 
on Capacity Planning & MRP Scheduling.

JIT600 made it possible for labor & inventory shop floor transactions to be 
entered in synchronization together as a single clerical action.  This had 
the added benefit of resolving some timing problems in how BPCS codes a shop 
order as ready for purge.

We make some parts in which there is repetitive requirements for a customer, 
so the official order might be for 500, but they actually make 550 & want to 
report 550 to the order.  Now it is real smart to increase the quantity 
needed from 500 to 550 on multi-operation order before the first operation is 
completed, but we do not always get our shop order maintenance promptly 
caught up with reality.

Suppose all the labor has been keyed in but not all the inventory 
transactions ... BPCS can say this order is ready for purge & so there is a 
risk that an evening's purge will get rid of an order that an inventory clerk 
was going to do a final transaction to the next morning.  But when we use 
JIT600 instead of SFC600 & INV500 that kind of problem is eliminated.

JIT600 under the covers is SFC600 except with the inventory transactions 
added.
The screens look identical to the clerical input person & the data is keyed 
in the same way.

We made a few minor modifications to this, after we found too frequent 
transcription errors where someone would key some data to the wrong field, 
like hours data to quantity field, or shop order # to hours field.  We now 
have some reasonableness checks on the scale of the data going in, like we do 
not allow any numbers with decimals going into the quantity - everything must 
be whole numbers, and since labor reporting is for one day's work, we do not 
allow more than 25 hours on one ticket (the day the time changes for a 
machine that is running non-stop).

The JIT application is a whole lot more than this, but that is about all of 
it that we are using, so consequently some other aspects of it like JIT300 
are a bit flawed for us.  We have the Unbeaten Path Manual on Production & 
Costing, which costs $250.00, and I highly reccommend.  It has charts of SFC 
vs. JIT, comparing the two applications & showing how you manage your shop 
floor if you are not using JIT & how you SHOULD manage it if you are using 
JIT & as I stated earlier we are not using a valid mixture, but we are 
managing satisfactorily other than enormous difficulty for many people 
nailing down where our cost variances & inefficiencies are located.

We launch our shop orders using the SFC MRP logic system & report our labor & 
inventory using JIT600.

The UPI Manual on this topic comes with a great guarantee & you can check out 
info on it at http://www.unbeatenpathintl.com/bpcsconsulting.html  You can 
sign up for one of their courses in which the content can be tailored to your 
business - mix & match the modules you want covered.  Many other 3rd party 
BPCS vendors offer education in BPCS but this is the only outfit I am aware 
of that sells the class materials as a separate package.

I have also been to SSA school.  Their class handouts are like a collection 
of screen images & representative reports.  I have also talked with people 
who have been to SSA school more recently than me & been told that in this 
respect nothing has changed.  The UPI class handouts are vastly superior in 
my opinion from perspective of understanding the big picture, although the 
mass paper detail is not there, with flow charts showing the 
inter-relationships of the various stages the application must process 
through & what data is available in what form where in the overall process, 
but both of these sets of handouts are aimed at end users & their department 
managers.  I also attended Crowe Chizek classes in BPCS topics, most of them 
during our 1998 conversion & one several years earlier ... their handout 
quality is not consistent, but it is getting better.  Crowe also hosts some 
regional BPCS User conferences & seminars that I want to attend some time.

There are also a number of newsletters & journals you can subscribe to on 
BPCS topics.  I think NexGen's is the best for departmental management 
getting the biggest bang out of the BPCS buck, while Crowe Chizek's is best 
for management long range BPCS planning, and I have found Iquest's extremely 
useful for seeing what is practical.  Technical people need something more 
than any of this, such as BPCS_L, the IBM Redbook on BPCS, and/or the DSlick 
BPCS Reference Manual.

There is also some on-line documentation that is extremely poorly indexed, 
because it was designed on another SSA sub-system then ported here without 
all the embedded controls working satisfactorily, but you might visit the DOC 
menu option 2 & select SSA RUN ? then scroll through what is available to you 
there.

I hope this has been somewhat helpful.

>  From:    Arrakal.Sony@psinetcs.com (Arrakal Sony)
>  
>  Hi,
>  I am new to BPCS. Can anyone tell me about the MMM Product JIT(Just in 
Time)
>  and also the relationship with SFC(Shop Floor Control).
>  Thanks in Advance,
>  Sony.

Al Macintyre  ���
MIS Manager Green Screen Programmer & Computer Janitor of BPCS 405 CD Rel-02 
running on AS/400 V4R3 http://www.cen-elec.com Central Industries of 
Indiana--->Quality manufacturer of wire harnesses and electrical 
sub-assemblies
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