Re: Time reporting in BPCS -- BPCS-L

We are wiring harness manufacturer using BPCS 405 CD.
We have used BPCS Notes and Doc very heavily for some specialized needs.

Engineering uses Routing Notes to track what going on in various
Engineering Changes
We issue a phantom EC item # into the BOM so on BOM300 etc. people can
rapidly see the Engineering Change history on an item, then go into the
notes on the EC itself for details

Purchasing uses Item Notes to store specific info related to Vendor Contracts.

We created a special item type and item classes for Machinery and Molds,
then Preventative Maintenance people use notes associated with those items
to track maintenance, when some part had to be replaced for example

QC used to go into BPCS Doc and creates Notes of name RMA#### which then
contains all details of QC investigating something that needed repairs,
which facility warehouse department responsible, what went wrong,
disposition ... reason is that Customer Order Notes in BPCS RMA are lost to
easy access when Accounting is finished with processing & QC wanted to be
able to review history of similar incidents.  That's our old method ... we
have since moved to a special form that goes around the company to make
sure all departments signed off on resolution.

For end items, last operation is 999 routed to have no labor or machine
reporting, just quantity, this forces shop orders to stay open until QC has
confirmed final production is completely satisfactory and shipping has
confirmed 100% of it did go to the customer.  Of course timing of this has
a negative impact on actual costs being up to date.

Once upon a time we had operation 990 for final inspection.
Problem was that for some parts we do not do 100% inspection, we only do
10% or some other sampling.
QC wanted to accurately report how many they actually inspected.
BPCS shop orders need to know that everything got done at a particular step.
BPCS not setup for random % inspection.
-
Al Macintyre (macwheel99@sigecom.net via Eudora)
Al's diary http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/

We are a pharmaceutical company using BPCS 4.0.4 together with the INQAS
Laboratory Information System ; we have both systems interfaced for lot
creation/release, master file update... and we would like to develop an
interface to report time spent by QC on shop orders ; we would like to know
if such interfaces have already been developed by other companies (may be
with other systems than LIMS) and if so what technologies have been used
(CIMPATH, custom API's...)