RMA History

BPCS 405 CD on AS/400 mixed mode

Trying to answer some questions today I discovered that I know entirely too
little about what is normal for RMA processing.  Looking into some of the
BPCS files, I find that I am coming away with more confusion than clarity.

Does anyone know off hand if RMAs make it into sales history?
Are RMAs supposed to get into sales history looking like negative sales?

If they do, is there any easy way to isolate RMA totals so as to eliminate
them from reports to only show what we sold / shipped, excluding involvement
of customer returns?

If I was looking at this before year end, I could have got it from SSH MTD
totals, but that door has now been closed on me.  Is there some other door
that is still open?

We supposedly use one warehouse for customer returns & another for customer
sales, but looking in the ECL file / RETURN member I can see that the data is
not there consistently according to my understanding of the company rules.
So I do not know what gets messed up when ECL / RETURN has the wrong
warehouse.

Evidently ECL file layout does not show a date that the RMA occurred.
Like ECL *FIRST, it shows when it was supposed to happen, and whether or not
it did happen, but not if it happened this month or whenever.

I can look at invoice line item history to find out when a regular customer
order shipment occurred, or at the ITH "B" transaction to see price &
standard cost & actual cost at time of shipment.  I am somewhat at a loss
where to find equivalent information when a customer return occurred.

I noticed that 100% of our activity in warehouses not used for shipping has
zero in all YTD fields of SSH.  I had thought that the YTD of SSH was a
perpetual last 12 months ... or is that zeroed during year end?  I should
have remembered to check YTD of SSH for shipment warehouses before I left the
office ... I will do that Thursday to see if perhaps some activity never
populates SSH, other than creating records with zero fields.

Our warehouse # system is 2 digits
1st digit is the facility
2nd digit is the type of item stored there
That is the system we now use ... there have been exceptions in the past

Examples using facility 2
21 is end items about to be shipped from facility 2
22 is manufacturing work in process not finished yet
27 is raw materials warehouse ... I am assuming all the SSH stuff that is 27
47 etc. is related to DRP resupply order fulfillment
29 is for QC returns to facility 2 ... I am assuming all the SSH stuff that
is 29 49 etc. are RMA returns
However, I found a lot of ECL_RETURN records with warehouse 21 that I thought
should be warehouse 29, but many many more than the discrepancies would
account for.

I had thought that billing adjustments need line item #s & customer PO#s to
negate totals on original orders, so that adjustments without item# would not
make it into SSH or SSD.  Meanwhile RMAs appear to be stored in member RETURN
of the various customer order & shipment detail files (EC* & ES*).

Should the grand total of what ends up in SSD on any given item be the same
as what goes into SSH?

We store List Price for reference in item master & try to catch shipments on
customer orders with missing price or miskeyed price, but sometimes something
slips by us, so to try to catch any mishaps in need of correction, I wrote a
query SSD_OVRIDE to computer pricing average last month SSD.SDSL01 /
SSD/SDQT01 (excluding SDQT01 EQ 0) & compare result to IIM.ILIST to identify
discrepancies.
With page break on RCM.CNME customer name, totals only on SSD.SDPROD to chart
one line per item sold that customer: total shipped; average selling price in
the overall month's billing; item list price; difference.

There are some items that look like we shipped some quantity at zero price,
but I have been told by my co-workers that this did not happen, so that
raised the question of whether RMAs contaminating my report, or something
else going wrong.

Analysing history files (ITH SLH etc.) on those items show shipments were at
correct price, but then I had a hard time with how the RMAs came back in ...
is it even possible to link some info in history of customer return inventory
with the customer order (e.g. ECL file RETURN member) which does not seem to
be showing WHEN the transaction occurred.

In one case I was told that we shipped 1000 for the month (and I found in the
history where it was two shipments of 500 each correctly priced), and also
got a customer return of the 1000 (and I found in the history where the 1000
came in as an inventory adjustment with no $ values associated with it).  The
total of the SSD shows we shipped 1000 with no price ... if I am doing this
right it would stand to reason it would be the other way round ... 0 shipped
but price there.

While running queries various different ways against SSH data, I found that
we had info in the SSH file on warehouses we have not shipped out of in over
a year (such as facility 3 which we closed Dec 1999).
What controls what customer/item/warehouse goes into SSH?  Some of those
warehouses took a couple months to get all the stuff cleaned out of BPCS
after we quit using them for real.

Perhaps my problem is excluding SDQT01 EQ 0 for two reasons ...
1. 01 is last month 02 prior month etc & I only wanted to get at last month
data
2. I am not fond of asking computer to divide by zero

On a hunch, I selected how many records have SDQT01 (Quantity for the month)
zero and SDSL01 (Sales dollars for the month) not zero, or the other way
around SDQT01 not zero and SDSL01 zero ... I found a few of these scenarios,
but they did not explain all the weirdness on my query that my co-workers
questioning that perhaps RMA ends up in sales history but does not go in
consistently.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)