> Al's idea of making users only enter TODAY is great, but will not fly
> here for a while. There is often a delay between when something
> happens and when we hear about it. I am trying to get rid of the
> postings to 2029!
Al is very knowledgeable about BPCS.
Thanks, but there are a few holes in my know-how, and my current work is
with 405 CD.
The only problem I would have is that we invoice Monday what is shipped
Friday... We need to be able to enter Friday's date as a ship date.
In 405 CD, billing goes pretty fast.
Shipping dept sends msg/400 when they are done with shipping for the day,
to CFO and to me (I run billing if it needs to be done after accounting
personnel have left for the evening).
In theory, we always complete our billing same day as shipment.
Occasionally, after shipping personnel have left for the day, a team of
customer service agent, production personnel, rushing some customer need
out the door and they unsure of 100% of the process.
We also have physical inventory of a warehouse overlapping production
there, in which various parts of the factory get roped off like a police
line ... this area is now off limits for production until physical is done
... if you absolutely positively have to remove something from here, have a
physical counter accompany you so that the relevant bins can have their
tags fixed. This means that some shipments, whose timing touches physical
inventory, need to get dated as if they were really done in the next fiscal
period.
Otherwise, we don't backdate or post-date any kind of transaction.
We have factory workers doing 2+ shifts, but clerical people working the
day shift.
There was a time, when I had a command key modification to change the date
to the last working day in the shop calendar. This was when we altered the
BPCS software to prevent the user from changing the date ... the program
initialization started some dates as TODAY date, and we altered the screen
so that the cursor refused to go into the date field.
Our end-month is run on a Friday nite, with some General Ledger reports run
the following Monday. Often the fiscal month is not closed for a few days,
to allow for accounting adjustments, but this opens a window for other
people to be backdating stuff that accounting might be ignorant of.
The CFO sends messages to people reminding them that this week is
end-month, that he wants to be notified as various people get done with
their transactions for the day week month.
Due to employee turn-over, any rules that everyone knows are at risk of not
being known to the new people.
We have people who sometimes come in on the weekend to catch up on whatever.
They tend to forget the significance of end-fiscal, since after all, they
not normally have anything to do with the concept.
If Friday was end-fiscal, and they are entering labor transactions for work
that was actually done Friday, this can mess up the reports accuracy that
accounting has already run for the month.
I want the transactions to go in using the date when the data was entered.
Now there is a potential problem.
The CFO might have end-fiscal dated Saturday, but he actually ran it Fri nite.
So here are these transactions going in, that the CFO knows nothing about,
that alter various totals that he has already run the end-month reports on.
Some time ago I showed the CFO how to use DSPLOG/400 to see who all was on
the system over the EOM fiscal weekend between when he was running Fri nite
EOM whose fiscal included Saturday, because depending on what those
Saturday users were doing, that might have updated BPCS with transactions
not reflected in the end-month reports he ran Fri nite, and will not be in
next month's reports either.
What I get calls about are people trying to release production orders on
the weekend, which the shop calendar has as a non-production day. I ask
them if those shop orders are to be actually made on the weekend ...
typically not ... they trying to get ahead of themselves with what has to
be ready for Monday morning. Well I not want to encourage teaching how to
muck with the date, so I show them how to change the calendar to make an
exception for that date that facility. It won't hurt MRP which got run the
previous nite, and that way they can do their regular shop order release
using the date of weekend when they release it.
Al Macintyre
BPCS/400 Computer Janitor at
http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com/
See Al at
http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac
Find BPCS Documentation Suppliers
http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html
midrange.com
