Re: New Item Creation -- BPCS-L

I make lots of suggestions. Some of them get accepted and approved. Perhaps you have similar situation such that some of my suggestions also relevant to your company.

Our process is also disjointed, and there is turnover of players in the various functions, so that key pieces of info can get dropped and not noticed they dropped, or someone outside the normal process get impatient and enter data but not realize all that should be entered.

We have setup some fields to contain special information outside of standard BPCS, then various people given the task of going into INV100 or MRP140 to enter THEIR data, and they see some fields that seem to them to be empty, that they can use for something of interest value to THEIR department, not realizing that BPCS uses those fields in a well defined way or that we have previously designated that field for a particular purpose.

I have suggested that I clone programs like INV100 to only display fields relevant to particular purposes, but so far we have only done this kind of thing on programs with high volume usage like JIT600 and INV500 where there are thousands of transactions a day, and fixing things so that the users can do the same thing with 1/3 the keystrokes has more immediate obvious benefits.

As customer expectations for fast response seem to approach need for instantaneous action by our people, when everything takes some discrete time period, we are getting customer orders entered before all the engineering is in place to make the parts, and a break down in communication to people implementing plans. I created a cluster of queries to identify items that have shop orders, MRP plans, customer orders, that lack essential BOM or Routings, and on a daily basis notify relevant co-workers of items added to this unpleasant reality. I suggested to my former boss that I ought to write a program that goes through a bunch of files to generate an audit report on mismatches, but he said the problem is going to be fixed so we not need to be writing software to address a problem that is going away. That was six months ago. We still have the problem.

Basically my unhappiness with our approach is that we have a humongous volume of queries identifying all kinds of glitches, like profit center incorrect in customer orders so that the wrong facility gets credit for the business, or an item on a customer order that is not coded for master scheduling. Every day we generate scores of queries listing any such problems, not printing them if no problems there, but someone has to look at spool to see which needs to be printed.

We use several fields of BPCS for our own purposes where we have found some that it not hurt BPCS for us to populate them any old way. I have suggested to management that we ask our BPCS tech support to provide a directory of fields in several files that are safe for us to do this for the combination of applications we are using, because I have a backlog of requests to do more of this kind of thing, and I not know which "unused" fields are safe to invade.

We often believe that we are going to make some new part for a customer before they approve the sample, but cannot actually make any more than the sample until it is approved, so we enter the item and BOM long before the Routings, so that customer order can be placed, and production control advised to IGNORE MRP telling them to make that customer item and its components, until sample approval. The reason we do this is so that Purchasing can get the Raw materials stocked up since our lead time can be 60 days on raw materials, while the customers, that we make to order for, expect 10 days lead time from us. I have suggested that we assign a field in item master to signify SAMPLE approval status, and print that field on various master schedules and MRP reports giving the staff a thumbs up or thumbs down on acting on various standard BPCS outputs.

We also have a data base outside of BPCS to collect information on new items, on a shared company PC-based network. I sometimes see that a customer orders a new item before BPCS has this information. I have suggested that we get a PC software guru to write something so that someone can enter customer-id and customer's part description to locate the corresponding PC-based information, just like inside BPCS/400 we can access BPCS information given key info.

Once upon a time we modified ORD500 Order Acknowledgements so that it did not matter who in the company changed a customer order, the acknowledgement of what got changed printed in the Customer Service department. I have suggested that it does not matter who in the company change engineering data, the audit trail of that change go to a spool file designated for engineering department staff overview.

I have suggested that we get an ISO document that charts what fields need to be populated, or an INV100 MRP140 clone that people use for entering a new end customer item with fields relabeled, and defaulted to what we usually key in (when experienced user doing it) to talk to the non-BPCS person asking for the kind of data often left out because a person entering a new item can overlook a lot of neccessary details.

Greetings All!

We are looking at our item creation process and trying to find a way to
incorporate it all into BPCS.
Currently we have a Notes database to collect information from the various
departments which also has approvals included.
Once this is all approved the documentation specialist inputs the item
master, bill of material and routing into BPCS. The item is then costed as
well.

We find that this process can be disjointed at times and are wondering how
other BPCS companies are handling this process.
We used to input the item master directly into BPCS before having all the
appropriate information for bills and routings.
This caused issues with production, ordering and other departments jumping
the gun so to speak.
I am very interested in knowing how others handle this.

Thanks in advance for your words of wisdom!
Karen Edwards
Arkwright, Inc.
538 Main St.
Fiskeville, RI 02823
Phone: 401-821-1000 X3275
Fax: 401-828-1550
email : kedwards@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Visit our website at: www.arkwright.com

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