Re: Firming Planned Orders -- BPCS-L

I snipped out some excess lines before replying.

You guys may be doing some extra clerical work.
I certainly believe we are also.

What we doing with less clerical than you guys is that by releasing shoporders, purchase orders, resupply orders ... this has the same effect as ifthe MRP planned orders get firmed. So that eliminates an enormous volumeof the manual work you doing interacting with BPCS. However, then we haveto manage orders released perhaps too early, whose requirements tend tofluctuate due to changes in customer orders. This can lead to us havingexcess inventory, because we made something for a customer order that aintthere any more, so we need to do a better job of tracking the effects ofdeleted customer orders.

Where I think we have excess manual work in need of some futuremodifications. The CIC file (item facility planning and cost summary)record for any given item gets automatically created by BPCS, if it notalready exists, if there is any activity for the item in the facility thatcould impact MRP, such as customer order input, engineering work. However,at time of creation the records have all kinds of defaults we do not like,such as nothing is master planned ... I would like it if the CIC record isauto created because of a customer order, that it should default to beingmaster planned. There's a whole bunch other fields where I think thedefaults poorly thought out by SSA, and some that are related to our ownstandards such as lead times.

This leads to a need for people to be supposed to check CIC in associationwith those first entries, which sometimes overlooked, until question comesup ... how come MRP is ignoring these customer orders?

One way to fix this would be to have the Company Business Rules for BPCSData Base Defaults stored in some kind of ISO document that identifies whatprograms need to be updated in association with each rule if that rule getschanged, then have some programs that run regularly to fix CIC defaults toagree with current company rules.


The alternative is the extra clerical work in BPCS,
or risk critical stuff get overlooked,

or risk that the business rules get changed, and the programmer unaware ofthe rules changes, or what programs affected

Arghhh!  Never mind.  You are correct and that's the way that I was
thinking that it should be.  It looks like it was set up incorrectly with
facility planning data for another facility.  It turns out that the guy
does manually convert his planned orders to firm planned orders.  It's just
that the one for this item wasn't showing up in the list when he does
release planned orders.  Sorry for the confusion.

Dave Parnin
--
Nishikawa Standard Company
Topeka, IN  46571
daparnin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"DanielWarthold"


Planned orders can only be firmed up manually, one by one, at the planner`s
will, for which he should have a good reason for firming them up. Thara are
advantages, but there are also risks involved in firming orders.

Daniel Warthold


----- Original Message -----
From: <daparnin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [BPCS-L] Firming Planned Orders

> Is there a flag somewhere to have MRP/MPS skip the planned order and go
> directly to a firm planned order?  It's been awhile since I've worked
> MRP/MPS in depth but I seem to recall that the firming up process was a
> manual one.  Today I got a call from a guy about a planned order asking
why
> it wasn't a firm planned order.  This is a new part that was set up by a
> fairly new person.  The call came from someone who has been in his
position
> for awhile and I tend to believe him when he says that they are always
firm
> orders.  Any thoughts would be appreciated.
>
> Dave Parnin
> --
> Nishikawa Standard Company
> Topeka, IN  46571
> daparnin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx