It has been a while since I studied the relevant documentation, so
hopefully someone else can give you a better answer, but it might be until
some time next week.
We don't use firm planned orders. The act of releasing a shop order or a
purchase order is like having a firm planned order. We went this route
because the company was trying to keep clerical person costs to a minimum.
My understanding is that a firm planned order is an optional step between
independent demand, and the orders that get the job done. You still need
the latter, unless you don't care about some stuff we care about.
For example, suppose you "create" some part without going through a shop
order, which you can do via INV500 transactions to add the made part, and
consume the raw materials. In the absense of shop order to a conclusion
(hey don't delete it), the actual cost will never trickle up to the end items.
This is important to us because some of our raw material components are
like gasoline pricing on steroids, We need to have rapid access to knowing
what end item profits have been adversely affected by fluctuations in raw
material pricing.
However, an alternative:
Create a new cost set ... call it TRUE COST or whatever floats your boat.
Zero out everything in that cost set if you previously used it for
something else
Copy 100% of your material costs & whatever else is important to TRUE COST
Do a standard cost rollup of TRUE COST.
You now have an actual cost that does not have to wait on shop orders to
make all the parts, then get purged, or deal with parts that you "made"
without using shop orders.
You can NOT copy TRUE COST back into actual cost.
Note that BPCS has no provision to get rid of a cost set when you are done
with it, but UPI has an archiving product called Locksmith, that can do
this for you, amontg other things.
We have been running into problems with customers expecting shorter and
shorter lead times on new parts, which can overwhelm our engineers in
setting up BOM & routings. We get the BOM in first, so new customer orders
can trigger purchase of raw materials before the routings completed. But
we have to be careful with effectivity dates ... BPCS defaults them to date
they go in, but MRP does not back plan new orders into a date that is
ineffective or past due on arrival.
We get some compensation for this by having safety stock early.
Also as year end approaches, there is high risk that people who have been
keying in 07 for year all year, will forget to key in 08 for year.
Commodity Pricing and Nulls are royal pains. This weekend I am reverse
engineering vendor freight expenses to end customer items. The path is
rather snakey.
We have rather long lead times (over a month) on some raw materials, and we
have some customers that change their requirements on short notice, which
means MRP replans when stuff is due. There is a field in the orders that
has the MRP reschedule date ... we run reports to identify orders where MRP
is telling us to pull up previously released orders to do them sooner.
MRP only does this one level down ... so we use the report to adjust due
dates on parent items, then after another MRP, go again for the next level
down.
There's been discussion about automating this, but no, people need to see
the data, to review glitches and exceptions.
We created a report to compare vendor history with planned lead times to
identify items where the lead times were out of sync with vendor behavior.
The on-line documentation from BPCS is like a sledge hammer across the
brain to comprehend ... I suggest you tackle it a little at a
time. Instead of using the front end, we go in with PDM against file
BPCSDOC in library *LIBL. If you can afford it, there are some great 3rd
party manuals for BPCS, with pricing starting around $250.00 each.
On more than one occasion, there has been a significant difference of
memory between me and co-workers on exactly what is going on various
places, such as with planning, expected costs, whether various things can
happen (like we are able to (accidentally) pay for a PO that we never
received), so we come up with tests to figure out exactly what is going on.
BPCS does support various simulations and test environment, but if you are
having trouble understanding what's going on in the regular data, this
stuff is not very helpful.
There are a gazillion codes for items in IIM item master and CIC item
facility planning file. When keying in new items, BPCS defaults to some
values which may be contrary to your company's standards, and easy for some
people to overlook. We have created some programs that do mass updates of
our items to enforce some rules, and thus reduce hassle for data
entry. You might want to review your in-house rules, to make sure you are
not getting some items not setup quite right.
For example, we report labor using JIT600 because it combines SFC600 with
INV500 ... lots more results with less keying. But there are some
gotchas. BPCS lets us create BOM that does not identify routing operation
where some part is used ... well if we individually report each operation,
none of which match some component in the BOM, then the component item is
never backflushed, to the detriment of inventory accuracy. So you have to
know how to root out glitches in your total data.
There may be variables in the system parameters, that vary with the version.
I suggest you run SYS800, screen print every screen, and make them
available for various people review "What does this mean?" but don't change
anything until you have studied what it means. BPCS Security is rather
tight on the BPCS Business Rules, but you can also access a lot via
Query/400 vs. ZPA file. Remember that BPCS Business Rules are actually
located in several different places, including Transaction Effects, and
Accounting.
In our setup, the shop orders have several collection points, in which the
first operations can need to be done a day or so before the later
operations, based on BPCS calculation how long all the steps will
take. The final operation is due when the next level needs the part, so I
figure OUR shop orders are being backward scheduled.
We use 405 CD to manufacture wiring harnesses for OEMs.
I hope my remarks have been somewhat helpful.
Al Macintyre ... Computer Janitor, programmer, data forensics
This is fairly complicated - please comment if you would.
Thanks,
Don
________________________________
From: John Campbell
Sent: Friday, October 05, 2007 3:54 PM
To: Don Cavaiani
Cc: Tina Hartmann; Doug Thompson
Subject: Sandbox Warrior Team Meeting
Don, the following two questions were raised during our last Sandbox
Warrior Team Meeting:
1. I thought that backward scheduling was always the norm when that
respective parameter was selected whether it's a shop order or planned
order. According to some of our team members shop orders are backward
scheduled however, planned orders are forward scheduled. Could you
please clarify or present this question to your friends on the BPCS
consortium?
2. What are our options within BPCS to enable us to add firm planned
orders? Can we substitute a firm planned order rather than a shop order
if we want to? Could you please clarify or present this question to your
friends on the BPCS consortium?
Thanks in advance,
John W. Campbell, CPIM
Purchasing Manager
Amerequip Corporation
1015 Calumet Avenue
Kiel, WI 53042-9624
Tel: (920) 894-7063 Ext. 309
Fax: (920) 894-3799
jcampbell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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