Basically you have a choice.
You can run your company as if facilities do not exist, or if everything is
same facility,
or you can run your company with different facilities, or you can have a
confused mess.
"Global" is for if you are not using the facilities feature of BPCS.
In some files you really need to have one or the other populated ...
facilities or global, not both. In other files, the only impact of having
population you aint using is the disk space and file access inefficiency.
Let's suppose the different facilities are geographically separated, not in
the same city. You might want to allow transit time between them. This is
impractical if same facility.
You can have different rules for how the facilities function.
If all your facilities are identical in function, and not separated
geographically, then perhaps you are trying to use the facilities function
to resolve something where warehouses would be the answer. We have
multiple warehouses inside the same facility building:
* shipping warehouse = end customer parts about ready to go out
* work-in-progress making sub-assemblies prior to final assembly
* etc.
In BPCS 405CD, warehouses can be further sub-divided into locations.
Once upon a time we did this, but there was a trade-off between inventory
accuracy and all the extra move transactions needed to get the inventory
from one location to another.
Also, inventory backflushing from labor in BPCS is not very intelligent
when it comes to picking locations to deduct the inventory from.
If you are running by facility, there are several files which must be
populated for that facility, for the whole ball of wax to run
correctly. Fortunately, BPCS provides capabilities to copy stuff from one
facility reality to another. However, for mass copies of thousands of
items, you may need outside programming help.
I am setting up various test environments. I see that I can set up the
BOM without putting in a Planning Facility - called Global Planning. Or,
I can put in the facility code - called Planning by Facility.
Does these two methods produce different results? Or, does it just give
you the ability to break up the planning runs so that they do not have to
process all facilities at one time?? Yet, you would have to run the
planning for all 3 facilities anyway, right?
TIA,
Don
Don F. Cavaiani
IT Manager
Amerequip Corp.
920-894-7063
"It's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the
credit." Harry S. Truman
midrange.com
