RE: BPCS-L Digest, Vol 2, Issue 2

Regarding your MRP reorg questions. We have similar problems regarding
negatives we have 8 warehouse, with 5 different facilities. We normally
have 5,000 to 6,000 shop orders open on any given day, with the shop
floor personnel posting roughly one third of those orders. Our master
schedule changes on a daily basis because of what was run for production
that day, therefore the MRP 100 Forecast will change and due to the lead
times in the MRP 140 for some purchased parts as well as some
manufactured parts, we found it necessary to run the reorg. every day
that way when one of the planners or buyers is looking at the MRP
records it is up to date. Currently after having studied the negative
problem in our facilities for the past year we have found that they are
due to human error 99% of the time, (not posting scrap, not substituting
parts, not using accurate counts) since we have at least 3 people in
charge of these warehouses divided up equally we monitor the negatives
either daily or weekly.
Another problem that we have are our BOM being accurate, if they are not
accurate then it can produce negatives
At any rate we have found that by running the following programs nightly
helps tremendously
CST 920
MRP500
MRP600
CAP500
CAP600
Then we run the BOM900 weekly.
In order for the system to be accurate you must have a good accuracies
with inventory. Also you probably should not rely as heavily on the
Queries there are other reports within BPCS that would be better and
more useful  or at least in the 6.0.04 version. There is the PRF which
is the performance measurement. The FOR forecasting which you can
retrieve various reports there are also several reports within the SFC
that you could use.

Hope this helps     

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Today's Topics:

   1. Normal Rates (Alister Wm Macintyre)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

message: 1
date: Sat, 03 Jan 2004 14:43:01 -0600
from: Alister Wm Macintyre <macwheel99@xxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Normal Rates

Are there any kind of industry statistics about what is normal that we
can compare to to see if our efforts at continuous improvement are in a
good place?
    * Using non-BPCS reports in BPCS ... how heavy is normal?
    * Scrap rate fluctuations ... are we out of line?
    * Negatives ... is it normal to have perception of drowning in them?

We are 405 CD Mixed Mode tracking by facility.

Reliance on Query/400 and modifications
------------------------------------------------------------
A large number of the reports used to run our company, to make planning
decisions, to run the shop floor production, are either Query/400
listings or RPG programs that I wrote.
Is it normal for companies to be under-relying on the report programs
that came with BPCS?
Is it normal for companies to be using Query/400 as a source of reports
used to run the business?

When I first learned Query, I understood what it was good for was a
detective investigative tool, period.
Query is very habit forming because it is incredibly fast to get a nice
looking report, compared to how long it takes to write a high level
language program.
Plus, we usually have several end users able to create their own query
reports.

I do not trust Query/400 on percentages because I suspect that if the
math should go to XXXXXX.XXXXXXXXX based on the numbers going into the
math and we chose to print XX.X % the losses in rounding is something
fierce

Do query professionals recommend two step math 1. use a work field big
enough to contain the wildest variations so as to get a good number
without rounding 2. move that result into to pretty print XX.X result

I was planning a review of all query definitions to see if the default
dates need to be moved up now that we are in a new year, and
contemplating what else is worth reviewing.

I do not trust Query/400 total time average percent because averages at
total time are an average of the numbers in the column above, not a
recalculation of the total line, and our data is lumpy.

Am I being unrealistic unreasonable?

What kind of scrap rate is normal ?
-------------------------------------------------
I run some scrap reports for people regularly.
There is one department I watch from week to week (wire cutting).
I get percentage scrap from grand total made vs. total scrap reported
via labor, not relying on query/400 math.
One week has been as high as 6-7% or as low as 1.5 % usually it hovers
around 4 % give or take a % one week to the next it can go up or down,
but it is pretty rare to go up or down by more than 2 %

I know we have discussed here before the many different definitions of
scrap, but for those companies that track reported scrap as a percentage
of what is made in production, do the figures I shared, assuming our
reporting is reasonably accurate, do they sound about normal, good, bad
?

I had been contemplating that it might be useful to do a totals only
report a bit different from what we now run ... we now show total by
department or some such break down, for some date range.

I thought it might be useful to see total for each of several date
ranges, for some department, with totals by date or date range, to see
how the percent fluctuates over the long haul.

I am not supposed to create new software just because I think it is a
good interesting idea, but rather because of a need expressed by my
users, or to accomplish my computer janitorial duties.

How much of a hassle are negatives for other companies?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------
Years ago, I used to kick everyone off the 400 once a week to run
various reorg, but I came under pressure due to complaints by people who
expect
24x7 access, so I began to do the reorg less often.  In the last few
months, research into how come MRP did not plan stuff we needed, causing
shortages, showed that when there is a big negative in customer or shop
allocations, MRP can under-plan by that amount.  Assuming all negatives
are unwanted, that means MRP under-planning also unwanted.  The result
is that now I am back to doing reorgs weekly, with some interest in more
often.  There is also a renewed interest in what causes the negatives
and how much is reasonable.

At any given moment, we have 5,000 shop orders open.
Each day we post in the neighborhood of 1,000 labor tickets against them
We have 1.64 million records in our inventory history file, and store
the transactions for one year Assuming the dead records are not a major
problem, this means we are inputting approx 30,000 inventory
transactions a week.
Checking a random month in the middle of December, I see that week we
added 25,000 ITH records.

I run a daily query to see how bad the negatives are (how urgent is a
reorg?) this looks at negative allocations in the item master.
We go up by 40-90 items a day after a prior nite reorg They are
dominated about 50-50 raw materials and sub-assemblies

We just did EOM EOY
A few days before this, production people have to clean up negatives in
shop orders.
We believe they are caused by failure to do proper labor reporting and
corrections.
We run lists of all order operations where the inventory requirements
are negative on hand inventory is negative other unwanted stuff

it is not unusual for us to have 25 pages (25 items to a page) in need
of clean up.

-
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/


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