Re: Automatic Shop Order generate. -- BPCS-L

We are 405 CD Mixed Mode make-to-order
We have safety stock.
We do not have the shop orders auto generated from the sales orders.

The way safety stock works for us. (a) there are raw materials whose lead time for us is longer than the lead time our customers expect from us, so MRP reorders raw materials leaving us with enough on-hand to handle the short lead time customers (b) we have customers who expect us to ship to them as soon as they are about to run-out, so we have safety stock of their finished goods ... as soon as the customer supply dips below that quantity, MRP reorders to fill the gap

When we release the orders, it is up to us what quantity to make, so we not do tiny quantities, but enough to be efficient.

Now we are using simple fixed human managed safety stock values. I have argued, and failed to convince, that we ought to be using dynamic safety stock around our customer seasonal needs, so as not to tie up company funds for inventory on parts not needed year round. I have also argued that we ought to consider minimum order quantity policy, on those sub-assemblies where the setup is such that tiny orders will cripple us on cost.

Thus we too have multiple challenges that various people thinking about and suggesting solutions, that have not achieved sufficient consensus to implement.

We also have a QC requirement to retain a tiny sample of some parts made so that in the event of a legal question months or years down the road, we can show what this or that part was like when we were making it. The way we handle that is for the production people to deliberately make more than the shop order calls for, and through labor to report the QC excess as scrap. I fear that with employee turn-over, and recession cutting into training dollars, that the various kinds of things supposed to be reported as scrap, that are not scrap, may be slipping and perhaps we need to rethink this and come up with some new kinds of ITE transactions and reporting method steps to add granularity to our scrap reporting. It ought to be somewhat predictable how much of this was created, based on how many shop order customer order delivery date runs, so that then we can see where reporting fell down.

A question for you ... how fast is the shop order paperwork in your hands after the customer order is entered? The way we do things we have minimum of 24 hour lag after customer order entered, and given the shortness of lead times of some customers wanting stuff from us 5 days after order placed, this is potentially a serious problem.

Customer Order comes in day-1 that evening I run rull generation MRP CAP and also MRP250 to spool file every other day, production control prints that MRP250 report and uses it to generate needed shop orders this means that potentially a customer order due in 5 days does not start production until 2 days before it is due, and it has many sub-assemblies.

Exception to this is when customer service communicates with production control to say that this or that item needs to be made faster than the normal MRP processing cycle, so shop orders are released manually, on those rush customer items. This is not as efficient as doing it through MRP, so we cannot be doing that for lots of items.

The way you doing things, how do you get the shop paperwork off of the shop orders launched by customer orders ... do you automatically get SFC520 from them, and are this a pile of tiny print runs where you can release to print continuously one behind the other without printer alignment hassles on each batch? Or does some person have to manually do stuff to get the shop paperwork on the automatically released shop orders?

Also can this be seton selectively ... only do it on the customer items where lead time for those customers is so short that this would be helpful?

Hello,
I have a couple of questions regarding the auto generation of shop orders
from sales order entry.
Our company has just turned this feature on, and we are having some issues
with the process.

First, it seems as though a shop order generates even if you have sufficient
inventory for an item. Is there a way to tell the system to only generate a
shop order if you do not have enough material to ship?

Next, we require that a retainer sample for each blend produced to be kept
in the lab. Therefore, we must create an additional .06 lb for the retainer.
Is there a way to have BPCS add this quantity to the amount of the shop
order being generated?

Next, we would prefer to have the lot# pre-assigned on our shop orders.
Currently, we are revising the shop order and changing the flag to
pre-assign before releasing the computer generated shop order. Is there a
setup parameter to change which will automatically set the pre-assign lot
number flag to yes?

Thank you for your help.
Ted