Re: Planned vs Allocated Inventory & Scheduling Customer Orders

Jenny ... more suggestions.
Some on top & some in line.

1. Using a sign-on that is a BPCS Security Officer so that all of the menus
are available, go visit all of them & screen print them & put them in a
binder, then start highlighting & checking off what's there that you been
using & what exists that you may have overlooked.

2. If you use Query/400 & like us have a ton of people creating queries, dump
*QRYDFN to *OUTFILE & create reference list by title of report of all that is
available.

3. Notice in BPCSDOC how each application has a reference list of what
options there are, sorted by what it is you might want to do.

I created our own BPCSDOC member which combines all of the above, through cut
& paste ... a master list of all the stuff we have ... vanilla, query/400,
and modifications.

4. If you print first few pages of each report & stick it in a binder of
sample reports, with flags on them ... HOW TO RUN THIS & what prompt screen
options exist, people can browse through & see what useful tools already
exist.  Also include the 300 inquiry images.

> Until you

(Art)

> said something about MRP250, we didn't know it existed.

We use MRP250 to consolidate shop orders at release time, and to adjust
quantities released to match what components are ready to go.  For example,
if we have 15,000 due tomorrow & another 15,000 due the next day, we might
run a consolidated shop order for 30,000, but if the input to that is shy
5,000 raw materials, we might release the initial order for 25,000.  This way
we try to avoid material availability problems before they happen & also
avoid some setup time bottlenecks.

We made a minor tweak to MRP250 printing to make it a mite more readable.

Our Production manager goes through MRP250, circling clusters of requirements
before actually releasing them through MRP ... I do not know exactly how, I
think MRP640 ... they supposed to be getting me step by step what they do,
since I have been asked to alter the sequence of release to kill some of the
material cost inaccuracies that creep in via CST900.

> I've developed an Access database that looks at some of this
> after the orders are released, but not before.
> I have ran a couple of reports from there, but
> right now I can only estimate that the majority of the orders we release
> should not be released because of material availability problems (one one
> product line).  We do have several other product lines that don't have the
> same sensitivity to material issues.

Do you use SFC230?

We cloned our own version of it to use less paper & structure the sequence by
information in our items & routing operations that are meaningful to the
production floor ... for example if we work on wire of same color, length,
terminals on ends, at same time, this is more efficient than just random
mixtures.

We have clustered the data so that within the date it is due, according to
the latest MRP, not the date that actually is in the order/operation, unless
MRP date is zero which means it can't improve on the actual date, what is to
be made is organized by configurable hints, replacing the vanila dispatch
reports.  At the top of our modified dispatch report is a list of stuff with
MRP date of all nines, meaning stuff that MRP is suggesting be yanked off the
shop floor & canceled.

We have a query/400 that lists shop orders that have been released, that MRP
has subsequently reccommended be pulled up or pushed back.  We have figured
out how to do date math in query/400 so we ignore the stuff needing only a
day or two tweaking.

>  We are in the process of flattening some of our bills, but that isn't an
> overnight task due to the approx. 35,000 end items we have on system.
>
>  Unfortunately, we don't have a CPIM.

Unfortunately, we don't have a Master Production Scheduler.

>  I've had some limited training in some
> of the concepts, but it gets complicated quick with all of the different
> options that can be employed to try to "control" the manufacturing
> environment.

Our purchasing manager runs a modified MRP240 report on a cyclical basis ...
some facilities checked twice a week, some once a week.  I added stuff that
he requested such as quantity on-hand & availability whole corporation as
distinct from the individual facility he is looking at.  This way if we are
hurting for some raw materials in one facility & have some excess at another,
it can be shifted, in concert with what's being ordered.

> Mac,
>
>  3.7 does have MRP300 and BOM300,
> but MRP300 is cumbersome to use when you
> have as many levels of the bill and shared parts that we do.  That is a
good
> idea to use a field in the item master for the customer part number.

> What do you do if different end items use the same component parts?

Perhaps you should state what the problem is, because we do this a lot.

We are only doing the customer identification in the end item.

We have also created some of our own programs that are BOM200 report variants
to get at the tree of components, then for each component we have added
information about what's going on at that level.

Actually our people interest is more in tracking where weird costs come from,
and managing where there are rate deviations & excess scrap, than using this
approach to manage shop floor communications.

Our end items have the customer part # in the description field.
Often the end item # and description field are identical, but some customers
have part #s that are more than 15 positions, so in those cases, we use an
item # that is like a shortened version of the customer part #, with the full
story in the description, then we have another field with actual customer #,
so this can be linked in reports.

Many end items share components.
End items of same customers.
Different customer parts.

For purposes of factory efficiency, we want to refer to a wire of some color
guage, alloy, length etc. based on what it is, a unique common component, not
by info that is unique to several customers.  This means we can mass produce
the components, but it also means we may appear to lose track of what it is
for, or where it should go next in the production process.

Our labor tickets have been massively modified.
On the top is preprinted item identification & Shop Order info needed for
keying in the labor.
We have like 3 columns of data.
On the left are boxes where people fill in the blanks with quantity made,
scrapped, employee, time, and other information that we use in labor &
inventory reporting.
In the middle is a dump of the first 40 odd lines of our routing notes
description which spells out step by step how the part is made & what
department this is to be sent to upon completion.
To the far right are a pair of charts ... mini-where-used & mini-BOM
the where-used points at end customer items CURRENTLY ON ORDER, prioritized
by what's needed first, at the time that the labor tickets were printed.
the BOM lists the component parts that are used in the making of this step.
Thus, all the information the production people need is on this one ticket
that has a yellow copy.  The yellow copy stays with the bins identifying the
material.

The shop floor people do not need to be looking at MRP300.
They have a ton of info on the labor tickets & our modified dispatch reports.
Setup people create "kits" of materials needed to do some order, they can see
what's missing & go to SFC300 to check on the process of providing some
sub-components or to PUR300 to check on when raw materials due.  This way an
operation is not started if it does not have all the materials called for.

Our inventory is by locations that use yellow painted lines on factory floor
& walls & markings on shelves, to make it easier to find stuff, but then
there have to be transactions to track actual movement.

We have menu for shop floor people with INV300 BOM300 SFC300 a routings
inquiry that we wrote using Query/400 & some other options, in which there
are a couple of floor standing dumb terminals per factory for easy look up as
needed.

>  Jenny Carr
>  Vice President
>  The Durham Company

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)
BPCS 405 CD Manager / Programmer @ Global Wire Technologies Incorporated
http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com = new name same quality wire
engineering company: fax # 812-424-6838