Re: Minimum balance -- BPCS-L

From Al Mac - part of the question has to do with the type of business you 
are.  Are you dealing with repetitive business or fluctuating business & do 
your customers provide you accurate forecasts & how long is what data stored 
in what files & how long in advance of shipments do you have customer 
requirements in what files?

We are in a business where some customers are constantly calling up to change 
their orders because they want JIT but do not have good internal controls to 
really see in advance where they are going.  So some customers use us like 
Kan Ban restocking their supplies.

I think the data in the MRP & CAP files is a very short term perspective, 
although it has excellent pictures not seen by other files, and 3rd party 
software is available to further refine those pictures.

From the ITH SIL SSD SSH files you can get at statistics on what you HAVE 
sent in the past year or so, depending on your system parameters retention.  
There are totals for Year, Months, & granularity of individual transactions, 
by end customer item.

From ECL you can get at data on what you WILL produce assuming the customers 
do not change their current requirements.

An interesting picture might be to compare what is in ECL for this month's 
totals vs. what is in the sales shipping history files for what was in this 
calendar month a year ago ... are sales quantities up or down by individual 
customer product?  If the data is pretty flat percentage wise, for other than 
customers lost & gained, then you know you can rely on historical data to 
help you with future planning.

Some customers supply Estimated Annual Usage, for purposes of us quoting 
pricing, but then this is only an estimate & could be way off.

Some customers supply long range forecasts & I am not sure what we do with 
them or how close they reflect the actual orders that materialize.

My interest is in the notion that we have safety stocks of raw materials 
based on the peak annual demand of seasonal customers.  Ideally we ought to 
have not one figure for safety stock but a customer calendar based safety 
stock, so that we could reduce $$$ tied up in safety stock that won't be 
needed for many months, then ramp up the supply as the customer seasons 
approach.  I suspect that kind of thinking might be contained within a module 
we have not purchased from SSA, such as FOR.

I have been developing modifications to extract from BOM which raw materials 
are shared by multiple customers & which are unique to specific customer 
model lines, but I do not yet have a grasp of how to track the customer 
seasons.

Alister William Macintyre 
Computer Data Janitor etc. of BPCS 405 CD Rel-02 on IBM e-Server i-Series 400 
model 170 OS4 V4R3 @ http://www.cen-elec.com Central Industries of 
Indiana--->Quality manufacturer of wire harnesses and electrical 
sub-assemblies

    ----- Original Message ----- 
I believe that the method you recommend will provide me with data on what
WAS produced rather than a summation of what we WILL produce.

Mitch Damon, CPIM
Planning Systems Manager
Logistics - Rochester, NY
(716) 383-1070 ext.250

Mitch,
 
The best way to do this is to trawl through the product receipts in the ITH
file that is, of course, whether you keep transaction history going back
that far.
 
Regards
 
Ian Bunn
Progeny/400

    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: Damon, Mitch <mailto:MDamon@agrilinkfoods.com>  

We are trying to use the data in the KFP file to calculate our annual
production on a time phased SKU level basis.  The problem I am having is
that the "dynamic" minimum balance which is calculated from the minimum
balance days and minimum balance horizon is actually static.  By this I mean
that the current minimum balance is used throughout the year even though we
will have significantly less demand in a few months which will lower the
minimum balance then but doesn't do us much good now.  Does anyone have any
ideas on how to address this issue?

Thanks
Mitch Damon, CPIM
Planning Systems Manager
Logistics - Rochester, NY
(716) 383-1070 ext.250


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