Re: Planning Improvements -- BPCS-L

I suggest you contact several places that offer BPCS full service tech support and ask what their prices are on solving this for you, in whole or in part.

You can get documentation that is pretty good, provided you have not heavily modified what you have ... in other words it not matter what version of BPCS you on, documentation is available for that version, but if you have modified that version, then documenting your differences is your company responsibility. Pretty Good is not good enough when modifications suggested by people who only have pretty good understanding.

APICS theory says that people are needed on the payroll to do certain planning functions. We let BPCS do most of those functions. But that also means dependency on key people who understand BPCS limitations.

Canned software is available that adds to what you can get from SSA, but often it is dependent upon accuracy of your BPCS engineering data, such as lead times and BOM.

Folks -

We use an old (4.0.03) version of BPCS, and currently have none of the
planning modules running.  Most of our planning is done using Excel, and
is relatively resource intensive.

Our products are very simple (~8 components, single level bills), our
sales order delivery times are short (typically same week), and our
purchasing lead times are long (typically 8-10 weeks).

We are (relatively) comfortable with our inventory levels and with our
service levels.  However, we want to improve . . .
1> the amount of effort necessary to plan the manufacturing and
procurement
2> the dependance on a few key people in the planning and procurement
process.
3> the transparency of the process - meaning the ability of other
departments (and eventually customers and suppliers) to know what is
happening when.

We are wary of the canned planning modules because . . .
- training is an issue due to our old BPCS, and we have no internal
knowledge
- the care and feeding of the system required to support standard
MRP/DRP seems onerous
- the effort required to implement

Can any of you suggest places (software, support) we might look to help
with this?

Thanks in advance . . .

Tom Jedrzejewicz
IS Manager, Contessa Food Products

- Al Macintyre http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac Find BPCS Documentation Suppliers http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html BPCS/400 Computer Janitor at http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com/ Part time may get commission from some BPCS vendors for helping them ... I will now say in a post if the product I commenting on is also one potentially involved with this ... not that I have made anything from this yet.