With any system, when people do not have confidence in the data veracity,
they tend not to be diligent in maintaining it, so you get reasons to lose
confidence.
We are in an industry where our EOM customers expect 2 week lead time on
their orders, while our vendors are typically 8 week lead times, so we have
to have a lot of safety stock. In our end-year inventory analysis we found
a lot of items that were no longer being used, that still had safety stock,
so we are currently restructuring our procedures to try to catch items
closer to the end of their life cycle with us.
How we check BOM for accuracy has evolved over the years.
With every new customer part, and every customer engineering change, we
make samples to be approved by the customer's inspectors, before we go into
full production. There is room for error in that process, but it is more
risk in the area of costs & lead times, than in how to make the part.
Last year I created a report that looked at PUR history to compare how long
it really took vendors to deliver the goods vs. what we have in our lead
times, then do the math for the difference, sorting the data onto the
report by that difference, so the biggest differences illuminated. Need
for this report is because we spend a lot of $ on expediting, that maybe
would not be needed if our lead times were better quality.
A lot of this checking is outside of my area of computer involvement.
As I understand it, there is supposed to be periodic spot checking, where
some final part is randomly selected, and all its engineering data
inspected for accuracy.
I have various reports showing what it cost to make some part vs. what its
pricing is, to illuminate parts that we appear to either be losing money on
or suffering extremely low profit margin. Management would check some of
them out & say "no problem, there's an error in the BOM" but what they did
not realize until physical inventory was that BPCS was consuming those
expensive parts that were in error in the BOM, causing us to order more, so
that in reality we were stockpiling expensive parts we did not need.
It is not just BOM which must be checked for accuracy.
We are in a very competitive industry in which it is critical that we know
our costs, so we can pass them on appropriately to our customers.
Routing errors can cause incorrrect costs, inventory problems.
While there are some co-workers on odd hours, the vast majoriity of them
are 1 big shift, so each weekday evening, and after some weekend stuff, I
run MRP500 MRP600 CAP600 full regeneration. On the evenings that someone
is working late entering customer orders, then that data not into MRP until
24 hours later, but it does show up on a planning report we call our
"schedule" which I have got set to run in the wee hours off of GO CMDSCDE
so the work force has a current copy when they show up first thing each
morning.
We have the option of doing an MRP net change in mid day, over the lunch break.
This is done if some customer sends in a huge set of customer order
changes, that our staff is able to get entered in the morning, then
everyone is invited to take a long lunch break since the AS/400 is going to
be extremely sluggish for an hour, but the net change will get done faster
if less people using the system, then after lunch, people run various
things to show what shop orders can be released that afternoon to work on
the big customer order changes.
I live in a company that is swimming in people wanting all kinds of
historical data in Excel format ... inventory not used in X months, price
changes by vendors, cost content of sales, reverse engineering General
Ledger entries. But our infrastructure is such that I end up spending a
large portion of my time data mining what other people need into their Excels.
One fellow gets data similar to what you are talking about, driven off of
customer orders, into a collection of AS/400 reports that are formatted
Excel-Friendly, then he uses Visual Basic to combine the contents of the
multiple Excels.
I wrote a modification, which has been greatly added to over the years, to
put BOM into Excel-friendly format, (originally Query/400 friendly), which
connects supply chain ... what items go to what customers, what raw
materials children needed for what end items, etc. My modification is not
dynamic ... I regenerate it most weekends.
Over the years, I have looked at various alternatives.
If Excel is "connected" to AS/400, you should see an AS/400 icon on your
Excel and an Excel icon on your Client Access. What you can do with this
is put in an Excel cell formula to extract the latest BPCS/400 data at time
of opening the Excel spread sheet, by having SQL/400 script inside the cell
formula. I have discouraged this approach at my employer because it was
apparent to me that this stuff was incredibly complicated, very easy for
people to make mistakes, and the capability was there to use the SQL to
update BPCS/400 in potentially damaging ways.
Hello All,
I was curious of how others are using BPCS to handle checking BPCS BOM for
accuracy and checking the Planned Order requirements. Any recommendations
would be greatly appreciated.
Currently our Planning Department maintains the BOM in BPCS. And our
Supply Chain department puts togheter their BOM in an excel sheet and it
calcultes the total quantiy required for each component that we create
purchase orders for. Then IT runs MPS/MRP once per month. Once MRP is
finished Supply Chain then checks BPCS BOM & Planned Requirements for each
component against the BOM in Excel. And sometimes there are issues with
the lack of communication with the two BOMs. I may be wrong but it seems
to me that we are doubling our work by maintianing a two seperate BOMs but
our users have very little trust in the BPCS system so almost everything
in BPCS is checked against some type of excel sheet. I think BPCS does a
good job but having to explain the proper way to use the system to its
maximum capabilities for them to beleive. :-) And I am pretty new to BPCS
myself.
So I was just looking for feedback on how this is handle for others. How
do you check the BOM for accuracy? And how do you check the planned order
quantities for accuracy before releaseing to purchase orders or shop orders?
Thanks in Advance
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