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There are in fact two major challenges here:(a) Have a theoretical system thought out that in practice will get the results you want, no matter what the circumstances. (b) Enforce ISO procedures so the system works with real people in real situations.
# 1 of our solution ... have a standard procedure that works most of the time, has no provision or rules to handle each of the many exceptions that can occur. We have rules to handle standard situations, and train mass of work force in those rules.
1. Each customer order needs to be for one facility plant profit center period.
We have customer service data entry people who do not understand this, or remember it, leading to individual lines of a customer order aimed at different facilities, and this is not noticed until in the pre-billing, we run a pile of reports to check things like shipped before price entered, mismatch between warehouse shipped from and profit center credited for the sale, and there's other kinds of errors that can be discovered after shipping, before billing.
We also have factory floor personnel down stream from customer service, whose training does not lie in having the accounting accurate, the general ledger accurate, just in satisfying the customer's need for the correct product, quantity, QC inspection perfect, get it to the customer on the date promised, or as close as possible. Those people are also very interested in maintaining accurate inventory quantities but not understand inventory cost component. In the absence of an ISO procedure for how they can deal with various scenarios, the result often messes up the G/L the Cost structure, and other things, that then need corrections or adjustments.
Ideally, before first shipment, each order contents should be consistent with ship from facility, warehouse, and profit center, and if shipment is needed from a different combination, then a new customer order should be created. In practice, we are sometimes short on the required quantity from one facility, and have enough to make up the difference from a different facility, and on short notice, decision is made to send what the corporation has, irrespective of where it is, or how the customer orders were setup.
We need to have a better ISO system for getting the inventory where it needs to be. If it is transferred across facilities via INV510, the costs get messed up, because the cost structure travels with the item, even though each facility has a different cost structure.
# 2 of our solution = let the parts be expedited in violation of the BPCS rules, then afterwards fix the BPCS records, as best we can. A handful of clerical people are kept busy making adjustments to handle exceptions to the standard rules.
2. I use DFU to fix the BBL and ECH files to make sure the Billing is in accordance with what data should have been in BPCS before and during shipping, and notify accounting and customer service people by MSG/400 and/or print out audit trails and/or e-mail what all corrections I made, through whatever back door. After the Invoicing, I sometimes further adjust ECH records, for example if the shipment went to the wrong Customer Purchase Order, I may sometimes revert the PO in the ECH after tweaking it to tell the Invoice what PO it should have gone out on.
Note that in Billing it is possible to bypass the Invoicing of selected input from Shipping, so we can make a bunch of changes to BBL ECH and even other files, then do a partial Billing, then do a bunch more changes and do another partial Billing, and so forth.
We have also made some modifications to the Invoicing software, mainly appearance of the Invoices, but also to fix a systemic BPCS bug with respect to rounding.
The result of this is for the Invoicing process to correctly post, so no corrections are needed to the Receivables, or their General Ledger consequences. Our corrections, to Customer Orders and Shipping BBL file in our pre-billing stage, are subsequently supplemented by adjustments to inventory and other places, if neccessary.
# 3 = Know how to deal with exceptions to the exceptions. There may be some holes in our thinking, leading to later further refinements of all that needs to be done.
3. There are some scenarios I cannot solve via the back door. For them, Accounting uses Post-Ship Billing to back out bad invoices, and re-do them how they should have been setup to run in the first place. Sometimes there needs to be further adjustments to General Ledger. We want as much as possible to fix stuff before it hits the General Ledger because the auditors do not look at all of BPCS, just the results, so we want to give them a clean picture by fixing messes up stream of what they see.
Note that once there has been a partial shipment of a customer order, or once there is a shipment, not yet billed, it is too late to make certain kinds of corrections through the BPCS front door.
When a customer order is created, various fields get defaults from various places, such as the pricing rules. Customer Service personnel can change from the defaults at time of entry, or later, before any partial shipment.
How can we get the sales to hit the correct Profit Centers on the G/L? The Cost of Sales post from the "B" Trans using the Profit Center from the Location where it was shipped from. The order header and Customer Master has a profit center which post sales. How do you split the sales amount to more than one Profit Center? There is not a Profit center on the Order detail or Invoice Lines. The "BL" Journals hit the Sales and A/R Accounts. How can we split this into a per plant / WH sales using Profit Center? Then we have sales and Cost by plant by account. Roger Henady Thorco Industries -- This is the SSA's BPCS ERP System (BPCS-L) mailing list To post a message email: BPCS-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options, visit: http://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/bpcs-l or email: BPCS-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives at http://archive.midrange.com/bpcs-l. Delivered-To: macwheel99@xxxxxxxxxxx
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