RE: Labor Load for customer orders -- BPCS-L

Daniel

The biggest bottleneck for running our company is lead times.

Our customers expect to be able to give us an order and have us deliver it to them a week later, but for some of our raw materials, our lead time is 2 months. This means we have to have safety stock, and a good advance estimate of customer annual usage to avoid being stuck with excess inventory or air freight charges for rush orders when we did not have enough raw materials, combined with accurate engineering feeding into thorough understanding of MRP.

We are not using Rough Cut. We kind of learned CAP at the same time as we began to use it, and had gained value out of CAP600 files before we got formal CAP education.

When we originally installed BPCS, we learned a lot but not CAP ... that was always an "out there" learn as time permits, because we might need it some day.

Our company only intermittently has had Capacity problems requiring serious Capacity planning. So long as we are able to operate with pretty much one shift not working most weekends, there is the general perception that we do not have a capacity problem.

But from a forecasting perspective, there is the question of what level of business can be accepted without causing a major upheaval, or if the factory needs to have some people work overtime, or if the work load getting piled up in some factory department is such that they ought to work Saturday, or can they catch up next week. Thus there are intermittent needs for data related to what CAP calculates, while we are not using it all the time to the point that we are experienced in the application.

Plus in this particular case, the modification was driven by what the customer (end users) wanted, at a time that I did not have a good enough understanding of CAP to explain alternatives. BPCS, and in fact any ERP, has a massive amount of data that can defy human comprehension, so sometimes it is more important to present it in a manner that is understandable to many people, than to achieve 100% perfection in data accuracy.

Al wrote:

In one of our modifications, we created a new file that has in it a
combination of facility customer end item that we sell that customer, and
there is a field = # of hours to make one of those parts, ignoring the
impact of scrap or setup time.  Then we have a program that goes down the
BOM to get at all manufactured components of the end item, then look at the
routings to calculate how long to make one item, and factor in the number
of copies of that component needed in the final assembly.  The program to
recalculate this based on current customer orders can be run at any time on
JOBQ.

Then with that info updated ... hours needed to make end items, ignoring
setup and scrap and move time, which depends on the quantity and common
efficiencies, we are then able to run a report off of customer orders left
to ship, to get a broad idea of the total hours by end item with sub-total
on customer.  This does not subtract based on WIP already completed ... it
is just a big picture overview of CAP simulation by customer, without
allowing for MRP date staggering.

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Daniel wrote

Comment:

That looks like Rough cut capacity planning. Was Rough cut capacity
planning not a good tool to use for this purpose?

- 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