Fwd: Kan Ban -- BPCS-L

Do any other companies using BPCS for your ERP have experience with customers using Kan Ban, where they expect zero lead time for their parts. Whenever they run low on the Kan Ban parts, they call us, and expect immediate shipment of whatever quantity they ask for, using us like a warehouse with safety stock of the end parts. Is there another name for this phenomena where "Kan Ban" is not the right terminology?

Can anyone suggest pros and cons of different ways of handling this business? I expect that BPCS can handle it, using some aspects of BPCS with which we are inexperienced. We are on BPCS 405 CD mixed mode AS/400 V5R1 We are doing engineering, costs, orders, inventory, by facility.

This Kan Ban concept is new to our BPCS users. Some co-workers seem to think safety stock is working Ok, while others seem to think our methods are not working right for the Kan Ban parts. I think the whole issue of what is working, and what is not working, is complicated by us accepting a whole bunch of parts new to BPCS in which we are trying to make them before the BOM and Routings get completed, so we are getting to experience reality for BPCS users not yet ready to use MRP as it is designed to be used, for those new parts with the engineering backlog.

We are accustomed to driving MRP using customer orders due on various dates a few weeks into the future. If Kan Ban is to be shipped when customer calls, should Post Ship Billing be used instead? - Al Macintyre BPCS/400 Computer Janitor at http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com/

Summary: Al suggests some areas for additional experiments, unless you already tried this stuff.

Allegedly Y"all tried something and it did not work out as expected. So invest a few hundred bucks in a call for BPCS tech support to tell you what you were doing wrong. You can tell them that you put safety stock on this item # and MRP ignored it ... why? Then they will point out whatever field it is of what file we need to have different setting on.

As I understand it, the customer says they will order 250,000 in one year, they just can't predict the precise timing ... when they call and say they ready for another chunk, they want it damn fast, so we need to be making enough before the demand comes in.

Ok, consider FORECASTING ... with MRP100 you can setup a Forecast on such an item that says "let's make 5,000 a week" (5k x 50 weeks = 250k). System Parameters (SYS800) say that Customer Orders will Consume the Forecast. This means we are making 5,000 a week into inventory, along comes Customer Order for 4,000 or 10,000 or whatever. we ship to the customer on the basis of THAT customer order line because the ForeCast has arranged in advance for MRP to plan on this even steady schedule. Try that out on an item or two and see if that works for us.

Take a look at Order Policy K K for Kan Ban? This sounds like the JIT plans where you setup a repetitive "daily" factory schedule Basically you can setup like 150 periods in which even quantities of the item are to be released through the factory

Review Ed DeHarde's suggestions again He had one about using a Consolidated Purchase Order Release deal that would work the same way as Shop Order Release. Perhaps we want to have a Planner Code for the stuff that crosses facilities and/or PEN needs, then have a Lee Slater "helper" running this deal for the ReSupply Order stuff. When Lee is ready to launch POs, he would first print what his "helpers" contributed, then do his stuff (process the "helper" output first to avoid duplication)

I previously suggested Y"all look at BPCS Outside Operations where some outfit outside of our company does some of the work and returns it to us
Review the criteria used in running MRP releaseable shop orders report
Does it list ALL items that would need shop orders?
Are there some on the list that we do not release shop orders on?
Review the criteria used in running the reports that Lee Slater uses in planning Purchase Orders Is he getting ALL items that are coded that would need something other than shop orders?

Between the two, are there any holes in what we are not looking at?

Review the documentation on DRP ... try out DRP in the TEST environment to see if it does stuff that we need to be doing now that we have increased the volume of resupply orders
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Al Macintyre
BPCS/400 Computer Janitor at http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com/

- Al Macintyre BPCS/400 Computer Janitor at http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com/ See Al at http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac Emergency notification (homeland, weather, etc.) http://www.emergencyemail.org/ Find BPCS Documentation Suppliers http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html