Historical RMA -- BPCS-L

We are on modified BPCS 405 CD mixed mode thru REL 02 and bunch of Y2K BMRs. We are not on OSG. We do not have ROBOT or AS/Set.

I could use an education on how RMA (Customer Returns) are SUPPOSED to work, in particular if an RMA is issued, but customer not return the stuff for months, what date is supposed to go on the returns transaction, and how does that date get there.

I am "the IT guy who works at nite" so various tasks that need to be run when no one else on BPCS are handed over to me, and when I first get those tasks, my understanding of them is limited to following instructions how to run them, then over the years I get an education as we deal with things that go wrong.

My understanding is that file GJW gets populated with stuff representing the work in the rest of BPCS that has Gen Led implications, then when we run the task to post to GL stuff for the current fiscal year period, it removes whatever is in GJW and sends it to GJH_GJD in whatever state of posted, unposted due to unresolved errors, and at that point shows up on GL radar screen such as GLD310 and all sorts of GL reports. Thus, any transactions in GJW not yet posted to Gen Led are invisible to accounting.

However, if any transaction is back dated to a prior fiscal period by any activity in BPCS, that falls below the radar screen of accounting, and we only find out because IT gets curious about the data in GJW after we have supposedly posted everything for fiscal month, so how come there are still records in this file.

So I created a query to count how many hits in GJW by fiscal year, period, and journal type ... I check that when EOM completed, then later check again & sometimes note that there has been an INCREASE in transactions added for a fiscal period that was CLOSED at the time those transactions got added.

The customer service people tell me that when they issue an RMA, they do not enter a date, it is generated by the system ... this seems odd to me because I thought RMAs used exactly the same software as ORD500.

I thought that when the parts are returned, they are SUPPOSED to be credited to the RMA # that has been issued, and I am wondering how much control the materials person has over the date of the transaction.

I had thought that everything in BPCS gets dated based on system date or work station date unless human operator changes it ... and in our case work station date is never more than a few days behind system date because I habitually kick everyone off to run backup/400 several times a week. I saw earlier on BPCS_L that if PC date is whacko, that can get propagated into BPCS but I had thought that did not apply to our version.

Suppose for the sake of argument that an RMA is issued in OCTOBER 2004, and the customer does not get around to returning the product until AFTER we have closed the GL fiscal year for 2004 ... does the returned material get posted with an October 2004 date, or when it was really returned?

It sounds to me like perhaps there should be a step associated with closing the fiscal year that says "List for us all the RMAs for this fiscal year that are still open, and rejigger their dates into the next fiscal year, so that when they come back, we get accurate information into our financial records, albeit perhaps not the right dates."

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Al Macintyre  http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac