Re: RAW MATERIAL BAR STOCK -- BPCS-L

There are several things we have done to resolve similar situations - take
your pick.

We have modified a few key programs.

You gave example of transaction like 3 feet 7 inches.
We do not want our people to be doing the math for either 3 feet & whatever
fraction or converting that to 43 inches.
We either provide them tape measure that says 43 inches, or whatever the
accurate data is that is to be keyed into BPCS, or we provide a front end
modification where they key in what they see & the modification does the
conversion.

Same principle as keying labor tickets ... they use clock times in hours &
minutes, BPCS uses decimal times ... we want to minimize work of humans
converting between the two.

We recognize that due to our inability to record 100% of our scrap, there
will be some shrinkage, so we round up consumption of materials wherever
practical.

I believe that you have the option of using stocking unit of measure and a
different unit of measure for purchasing and/or for sales ... this may be
BPCS version sensitive.

Our stocking unit of measure for wire in production can be in inches or feet.
(Unit of Measure "IN" or "FT") until the mixture becomes a sub-assembly that
is then tracked as individual units of that part #.
We might have a wire that is 105 inches long.

Our stocking unit of measure for the wire we manufacture is in thousands of
feet (Unit of Measure "M") - we typically might have 100,000 feet of wire on
a reel.

Bill of Materials handles conversion between different parts using different
Units of Measure, that are best suited to how those individual parts are
processed.

We have some tape measures in decimal - you know, European system of Meters &
Centimeters ... I guess we could make some tape measures in 10ths of feet,
but I can't see justifying that expense.

Actually most of our customer drawings call for parts in binary fractions
like 15/32 of an inch, so we have created handy dandy charts for people to
use ... if this is 7/16 of an inch, what do you key in?

We have some incredibly tiny components - can put several of them on a
postage stamp - we count them using sample weight which might be what 1,000
of them weigh, or some related quantity ... weigh the whole container,
subtract the standard weight of an empty container, divide the sample weight
into the result & you have how many are in there in multiples of 1,000 or
whatever, then key that into BPCS.

We created a phantom part consisting of 1/1000 of a carton.
This was because some customers want us to pack some quantities by carton &
we were attempting to include in our inventory the reordering of cartons ...
we have now abandoned that & gone to reordering based on the pile visually
getting low.

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

>  From:    Cdoe@barton-instruments.com (Chick Doe)
>
>  we purchase quite a bit of raw material (bar stock). our stocking unit of
> measure is linear feet. BPCS wants all transaction qtys to be to three
> decimal positions. but the tape measures are in feet and inches. so if we
> want to transact a bar that measures 3 feet 7 inches, what should we enter
> into BPCS as the qty? if i convert to feet with decimal positions i get 3.
> 583333 feet. we could do this conversion (i'd like to think that our
material
> movers can do this).
>  but what do we enter if it is 7 bars each 3 feet 7 inches? to do this is
it
> 25.08333 feet?
>
>  to make this conversion easier, has anybody ever seen a tape measure that
> was measures in feet and decimal portions of a foot. in other words, a tape
> measure that we could read 3.58 feet directly from the tape measure?
>
>  chick doe
>  barton instrument systems