physical inventory SKIP WIP -- BPCS-L

We are BPCS 405 CD

Here I am once again sharing a challenge, in hopes of helpful suggestions, and I would not be surprised if other companies here have similar needs. I am still working on the last challenge involving items the MRP is planning NOT & thanks to ideas y"all suggested here, which led to still more ideas, I have managed to reduce the intensity from 1,500 items (peak) to approx 500.

I have been informed that between Christmas and New Years the company wants to do a physical inventory of our RAW MATERIALS and FINISHED END ITEMS but skip the inventory of the WORK IN PROCESS ITEMS and from me they want to know about the practicality of implementing this.

My first reaction was *censored* *censored* *censored*.

I thought perhaps we could create a modification of physical inventory programs to ignore items of item type 2, but I soon concluded "Oh Ghod, I do not want to be modifying INV650." and "How are we going to test any modifications?" I think that we could create some TAGS, inspect results, then clear them and start over, without doing any damage, so modifying INV620 seems to be the least risk.

Once upon a time we had a warehouse for raw materials separate and distinct from warehouse for production work ... if it was still that reality, we could opt to inventory the RAW warehouse and the SHIPPING warehouse, and skip the WIP warehouse ... on the eve of physical, depopulate the WIP warehouse of any END or RAW items moving them to warehouse where counting will take place. However, in the last year there has been a merger of warehouse contents, so that approach is not an option this year.

let's suppose the company had the self-discipline to REALLY shut down all operations from start of physical to end of it, with absolutely caught up on all transactions for December prior to start of physical and self-discipline to refrain from back dating any transactions in 2005 into 2004 (I have a real hard time imagining such a reality based on my 20 years experience with the company, but the incentive of not having to inventory work-in-process could be a powerful motivator)

and let's suppose I modified INV620 which creates the tags so as to identify which items are type-2 (WIP) and for those items populate the field that INV650 is going to use for physical inventory, which I THINK is PHQTY to contain ON-HAND total associated with that ITEM WAREHOUSE LOCATION combination

only do this for type-2 ... all other types would need normal physical counting

then when we dump the tags back into BPCS, what would go into type-2 items would be the inventory that existed at the time that we created the tags

I would also want to alter tags printing to show what is type-2 (easiest part of this) and perhaps instead of using ILI-logical 7 as the sequence, create a JOIN file with item master to sequence stuff by warehouse / item type / description / item / location

There is also a related issue of items that are wrongfully coded. Let's suppose during the physical, a decision is made to fix some item that has wrong engineering information. I think we will need a rule ... if you gonna do that,in the middle of the physical, you also gonna have to physically inventory every place that item is, irrespective of whether it ever was item type 2

So does this plan of action appear workable, or am I missing some major nuances?

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