Re: Outside operation coding -- BPCS-L

We are also BPCS 405CD but NO outside operations.
Here are some ideas you might want to consider.

For some critical WIP (they never explained the logic to me why these
operations are deserving of this) we have operation 999 which is structured
for zero labor cost and zero raw materials consumed, just the final part is
received.  It's function is paperwork inspection.

We have all kinds of shop floor inspections to make sure the part is
manufactured precisely correctly.  Operation 999 is to make sure all the
reporting and paperwork done right before the shop order is finalized.

As I mentioned in another thread here, when we do CST900 we precede it with
a query to work file that captures list of FSO data associated with orders
coded for purge, and tacks on cost BEFORE the purge, so that AFTER the
purge we can run reports on what the impact those orders had on our now
costs.  One of those reports is end items ... show cost standard and
actual, price, so we can compare standard profit with actual profit.

There's also at time of shipment, let's look at actual cost to see if it
was out of line.

We have EOM reports off of SSD and SSH files, that sort profitability by
item by customer, to give overall picture for month, year to date.  Another
set of reports from the accounting files end to show which customers are
paying their bills promptly and which are consistently late.

Our customers request periodic reviews & they also get them when they
change the parts.

So basically we are looking at prices from various different perspectives
to see which are problematic.

We use JIT600 on 99% of our labor reporting because it dramatically reduces
paperwork and input keying (I have not been able to persuade the powers
that be to go with bar coding):
One shop order operation labor ticket summary screen (leave employee # blank)
You get a crew screen to do multiple start stop times all on the one ticket
Then there is the inventory raw materials manipulation screen
In many cases we just take defaults.

I have always seen a problem with customer service drill down to status of
our production of an order.  Let's suppose that for some reason we have
some order is late.  It might be due to a problem with raw materials.  It
might be due to inspection stopping production & repairs needed.  It might
be a problem with a bottleneck machine that generated excess scrap, now
fixed, but the work there is delayed.  There are an infinity of possible
reasons why a customer order is coming late, but usually the first that
customer service knows is that the delivery date comes and goes but the
part did not leave the building.  I think what's needed is MRP
education.  How to drill down through the MRP data to see that the required
components of a customer order are in expedite mode, or some report that
takes what is in expedite mode and pegs it to what customer orders it is
for, then provides an alert that perhaps we have a problem with those orders.


>So, what do you guys do?
>
>BPCS 4.05CD.  Roughly 50% of my product line calls for an outside operation.
>The routing/process labor step is coded 'C' with a standard cost and queue
>time.
>
>The problem is that I'd like to set up a blanket order to fix pricing, which
>is individually done now - we'd like some sort of across-the-board pricing.
>We'd like to cut down a ton of paperwork and operations - keying printing
>and filing the PO, pulling it, matching it with the receiver and invoice,
>etc.  When you setup a blanket like this, the identifiability of the item is
>lost - customer service can't see that the item has 'left' WIP and is now
>rambling about the countryside somewhere.
>
>Should I use some sort of inventory transaction to maintain trackability?
>Report labor against a fictitious labor step (so as not to add cost)?
>
>How do you do it, please?

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