BOM Effective Date Management

I am hoping that one or more of you have a better way to manage
engineering changes that require the setting and using of
effective/discontinued dates in bills of material.

We are on BPCS version 8.0 (and planning conversion to LX).

Our practice (on engineering changes for use-up of the old part)
is to:

1 - Estimate the day on which we will run out of the old part,
and enter that discontinued date into all the current bills of material
that call for the part. (After making sure that this date will give us
enough time to get the new part).

2 - Add the new part to the same BOM, effective the next day.

3 - Later, when shop orders are issued, check for new and old
parts, and if the estimate was off, change the shop order BOM to reflect
the correct part number and adjust the effective date. (Of course we
wait until approximately the estimated effective date to do this check).


The situation is complicated by the fact that we are running
behind our planned schedules - that is, some new shop orders are being
issued later than their original planned starting date, some earlier.
One reason for this is that we increasingly are checking to make sure
that all components are on hand before starting a job - if they are not,
we delay start and expedite - but this combines with the effective date
management problem to result in often checking for the wrong part (We
determine that part A is here, but really we should have been checking
for part B).

Obviously, getting all jobs to schedule would greatly simplify
the problem, and we are working on that ( with some success).

Can anyone suggest improvement solutions?

Dick Bailey
MCFA, Inc.