RE: Phantoms. -- BPCS-L

Al Mac / Pierre,  

We have found in our experience that the system does in fact let you handle
inventory, open shop orders, and have customer orders placed against
phantoms.  This can be a blessing and a curse as I mentioned some of the
problems in my last e-mail. 

A couple of main difference I have found is in the way the system handles
the phantoms:

One is when opening the shop orders.  If you have inventory it will assume
to use that quantity first no matter what warehouse within that facility.
It will then 'blow-through' the phantom and pull the appropriate quantities
of the phantom components needed to make the upper level quantity. This is
where you have to be careful on how you issue inventory to the shop order so
that you do not mess up the inventory.

The second is that the system will show planned orders for phantoms in
MRP300 but will not show up on MRP250 releasable order report and they will
not come up in MRP540 release planned orders.  We get an error message that
'This item is not a manufactured item type.' in MRP540. Therefore phantoms
would have to be released through SFC500 which in our experience creates
duplicate needs for the components until the next MRP gen is run.

Phantoms are useful for us for organizing our bill of materials.  It allows
groupings of parts that may change to create a new bill without having to
key a multitude of items (as I said our finished goods have over 300 items
structured.)  It is kind of like having features and options without using
feature and options function in BPCS.  

We also have some phantoms that could be sub-assembled and may be sold as a
service part, but for general production we assemble it 'on the line'.
However, our service department is structured under a separate facility so
they could sell and inventory phantom items as needed in the system.  But
through experience we realized the phantom needs were not being met though
the DRP need back to the manufacturing facility.  We did not see the planned
orders in our reports for the phantom items.  We have since changed and do
not allow phantoms on a customer order either.  We weekly review the
customer parts orders for any phantoms and create a kit or sub-assembly to
fulfill their needs where we want to continue to use a phantom in the
manufacturing process.  (Accounting likes this better anyway.)

A note of caution - make sure you have the latest release of your software
if you are planning on using phantoms:
We have found other issues on phantoms that SSA had to create fixes for on
version 6.0.04. 
Here are some phantom issues we have had where latest software was needed: 
- adding phantom items to shop order detail does not blow-through components
when no inventory exists on the phantom,
- adding phantoms to a shop order in a facility without a bill corrupts
allocations, 
- nested phantoms (a phantom structured under another phantom) does not blow
through on the MRP250 report,
- adding phantom items with a phantom item as a component of the phantom
being added does not 'blow-through' the second phantom in shop order detail,
- and phantoms that are in a non-allocatable warehouse (we had phantom items
in our 'reject' warehouse) are being pulled for a shop order.  

I have heard of other people using phantoms to record changes to a bill of
material - but we do not use them for that purpose, so I'm not sure how that
would work.  We use the effectivity dates for changes and a project number
that ties back to why it was changed.  Using the effective date in the BOM
lets us know when the change occurred and gives us historical visibility
within the system.  We do not use the ECO functionality of BPCS and I have
heard that it is tedious and cumbersome, which may be why people are using
phantoms for recording changes.

Beth A. Norris
Production Control Manager
Fawn Engineering
Des Moines, IA
bnorris@wittern.com








-----Original Message-----
From: MacWheel99@aol.com [mailto:MacWheel99@aol.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2001 1:20 PM
To: BPCS-L@midrange.com
Subject: Re: Phantoms.


> From: P.Deveau@bluelineinc.com
>  
>       Are they somebody have somes experiences with phantoms.
>       I have finished good using a phantoms in it. I have specifics
routing
>  on my Finished good.
>       My phantom used Raw Material and have specifics operations to
process
>  on it.
>        I issued my Shop order on my finished good and used the BLOW-Thru.
>       The Blow-thru work with my components. If I don't have phantoms in
>  stock, it will required the raw material.
>       On the shop packet raw material will appear on it. But only
operation
>  tied to my finished good will appear on my shop packet. Operation tied to
>  my phantom not appear on my shop packet. ( this is my problem).
>       Operations must be on my phantom for costing reason and cannot be
>  duplicate finished good (for costing reason and if I have some phantoms
in
>  stock my shop packet will not take care of it).
>       Somebody can help me.
>  
>  
>  Pierre Deveau

I think it might be constructive if you were to describe the task that you 
want to accomplsh for which you are using phantoms in this way, because it 
might be a case of having found the wrong tool ... like you using a hammer 
when you really need a screw driver.

It seems to me that your problem is that BPCS phantoms are designed to work 
right but you want them to work a different way.  Have you read the BPCS 
documentation on phantoms?

We have used phantoms in other ERP before we came to BPCS & conceptually
they 
worked the same way as in BPCS, which leads me to suspect that there is an 
ERP standard out there.  Have you read what APICS has to say on the function

of phantoms?

In MAPICS before we were on BPCS, that ERP did not handle as many decimal 
places as BPCS, although MAPICS was mathematically compliant, while BPCS is 
not ... ie. you could trust the results of mathematics in MAPICS.

At the time, we were tracking carton consumption ... now we use a reorder 
point visual approach like office supplies ... and we had customers that 
would say something like please put 1500 items in one carton, but we could 
not put 1/1500 of a carton in our BOM because MAPICS BOM did not go to that 
many decimal places, so we had a phantom that was 1/100 of a carton & got
the 
math to come out right that way.

Today in BPCS we primarily use phantoms as a visual extension of notes.
When someone is looking at BOM of some end item, there are phantoms there 
with part # prefixes of EC for engineering change history ... so folks can 
see at a glance on any BOM related inquiry or report what the history of 
engineering changes is on this item.

99% of our manufactured items have both BOM & Routings
This goes several levels BOM deep
All of our routings have additional description lines
This information directs shop floor in part making
Many kinds of items have notes

Now that David says the midrange dot com archive server is back up again,
you 
might check BPCS-L archives.  Seems to me there was a discussion some time 
ago about (put this in the search engine) "Costing Bills" meaning BOM for 
purposes of costing instead of for purposes of manufacturing, and also 
discussions on "method codes."  I am just here trying to direct you to the 
notion that BPCS is a tool box with many specialized tools, some of which
may 
be more appropriate to what you trying to accomplish than by using phantoms.

How did you get your phantoms into inventory stock in the first place?
Are you supposed to ever have any quantity of them other than zero?

Beth A. Norris's post described scenarios with phantoms in stock indicating 
to me a category of possibilities I had not realized existed.  She also 
mentioned challenges with different warehouses in the same facility.  We
also 
have several warehouses per facility, but our version of BPCS only supports 
one warehouse for production, so we have a program we run immediately before

MRP to make sure our files are properly populated with the warehouse where 
the material is to be moved based on how we use different warehouses in 
production.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)
AS/400 Data Manager & Programmer for BPCS 405 CD Rel-02 mixed mode (twinax 
interactive & batch) @ http://www.cen-elec.com Central Industries of 
Indiana--->Quality manufacturer of wire harnesses and electrical 
sub-assemblies - fax # 812-424-6838

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