Re: WIP Reporting in BPCS 6.02 -- BPCS-L

Check BPCS_L archives.  There has been a lot of traffic with tips for
getting at BPCS cost data.

We are BPCS 405 CD.

We cloned CST270 and had it use a different logical for the operations,
that excludes lines of additional description and notes, which made the
thing almost readable, but there is still the challenge of drill down.  We
make some part that has 50 sub-components and it is evident that the cost
variance is due to 2 of them, but you need to see the story on those 2 when
they were manufactured and their shop orders have since been purged.  Now
you could keep CST270 from CST900 cluttering up your spool file, and search
on various items in various reports and this gets quite tedious.

Most of our WIP variances are due to labor reporting actual hours at odds
with standard hours.  This leads to the sub-components capturing this cost
variance as a material variance, when it is really a labor
variance.  Another problem is that CST900 processes purge in sequence of
shop order numbers not the lowest parts first in the product
structure.  This is significant because it uses the latest cost for
materials consumed by the orders, not the cost at the time of consumption,
so that if you use a number system like we do of parent items dash
sub-assemblies, then the parent items costs are updated before the
sub-assemblies whose costs are essential to accuracy in the parent parts,
so if you have a lot of labor rate fluctuations, this translates to a lot
of inaccuracy in WIP costs.

Right before running CST900 we copy to a Query/400 work file a list of all
the orders coded for purge, basically FSO information with current cost
data actual and standard added with old variance.
After running CST900 we match the work file with the new actual cost data
which then fuels a bunch of queries.
How much the purge changed actual costs.
Those items purged that are end items ... standard and actual profit.
Sort variance as a percentage.
Shop orders coded for purge that did not go away in the purge.

I have a flow chart summarizing to my users what we are doing in a WORD
document that I can send people ... ask ME not the list, for a copy if you
interested.  It is called JCSTEAMAC.doc because this COST scheme was
dreamed up as a TEAM effort between my co-worker JC and myself MAC.  I
created the flow chart after various people seemed to get confused about
how we were deriving the data.

We have another report, used by accounting, that totals current inventory
costs by item class type warehouse facility.  They use this to make monthly
General Ledger adjustments.

>Has anyone had any luck with finding some programs that print a better wip
>costing report in BPCS? We would like a better CST270 type of report than
>the one that comes with BPCS. Thanks Kevin W.

-
Al Macintyre (macwheel99@sigecom.net via Eudora)