Re: Data Mapping

[Alister Wm Macintyre <macwheel99@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

There are any number of packages out there.  I not want to explore much 
detail, in any one package, beyond my prior answers in case these packages 
are not a direction that interests you.

Does this scenario strike a nerve ... you enter customer orders where you 
promise to send the parts to the customer on date X, and date X rolls 
around and it does not go out on time.  Come to find out there is a 
bottleneck making some sub-assembly for lack of some component that you had 
plenty of at some other facility.  Had you only known about this a few days 
earlier, the part could have gone out on the date promised to the 
customer.  People in the company knew about this, but there is just so much 
data in BPCS.  Well there is an add on package that looks at your customer 
orders, purchase orders, shop orders, resupply orders etc. and identifies 
the bottlenecks and their consequences ... tell customer service in advance 
which orders will not ship out on time, and why ... tell production control 
what the consequences will be of not solving this bottleneck promptly.

Lots of posts here about automating some tasks ... what parameters to feed in.
There's at least one package out there to manage all of that ... automate 
any BPCS steps, add artificial intelligence to deal with the unexpected.

We have had any number of posts where some field gets corrupted 
intermittently, and there are lots of clues, places to look, and you could 
journal log the field, but this can be so tedious.  You can get an add on 
package where you specify what field(s) you want to track, such as in 
customer orders the price, profit center, company number ... and then you 
later can access inquiry or report on who all changed that stuff using what 
program ... BPCS program or something else.  So a new problem starts to 
develop ... turn on what field you want to track in addition to the 
others.  If I have heard the complaint once, I have heard it a hundred 
times ... the price on this item got changed by mistake, we know not now 
the circumstances, and we did not find out until 6 months later that we had 
been short changing ourselves on this item.

Sometimes some people want to look at ancient data, but that is exception 
to performance trade-off, so there are various archiving products to make 
easy access to ancient BPCS data, while improving BPCS performance 
astronomically.  Some tasks that now take many hours, will now run in a few 
minutes.

Does it sometimes seem a bit tedious how to get customer order data into BPCS?
Seems like every customer wants a different way to deliver the data to us 
... go to their web site, and no two are structured the same ... get the 
data electronically and no two do it the same way ... get data via fax and 
no two are formatted alike
There can be humongous volume of human keying to transcribe all this into 
BPCS, and it is urgent to get it done fast because of shorter lead times
Because of the time pressure, and data volume, there is then a risk of 
human error, not spotted in time
Well there is an add on product that will automate all of that ... no 
matter web site designs, fax formats ... so long as the data is being 
transcribed from one place, such as fax came to PC screen, to another 
place, such as ORD500 input
then your staff can focus on the exceptions, and on real customer service

Managing BPCS is a team effort by many people, each of whom know only part 
of a very big picture.  We can have team members who are omitting data in 
some key fields because of a lapse in their training ... e.g. items ordered 
for customers ought to be master scheduled items, items manufactured 
through JIT600 should have operation at which they are to be issued ... 
people omit that stuff, and you do not know it until your inventory is all 
screwed up.  There's software that was developed during Y2K conversions 
that look at the pattern of your data and find stuff that violates your 
patterns.

BPCS Security can be rather obtuse.  How do you know it is setup correctly?
You can get a software package to not only manage BPCS Security settings 
more sensibly that out of the box, but also inspect your 400 Security 
settings also for risks.

In e-commerce UCC_NET and now RFID, dirty data can really hurt you, and 
there are so many places that you can have it.  Managing your data for 
success in new technologies can overwhelm the in-house staff, but there are 
packages to help solve all of the above.

On a limited budget, one has to identify which of these areas is the 
biggest bang for the buck, most useful to your company.

Al Mac