I won't duplicate the excellent guidance already given by other posters.
Maybe plink at some areas worth considering, or being aware of.
The on-line manuals that came with BPCS are quite detailed, but they are
not user-friendly. The UPI manuals, like Milt link, are great overview of
how the system is supposed to be used, and how to navigate the many
programs. They are not that strong with trouble-shooting, since you are
supposed to use competent tech support for that.
You might review the Purchase Order, Receiving, Unvouchered, Payables process.
In there, in addition to the Actual and Standard Cost associated with the
rest of BPCS, there is also EXPECTED COST. There can be serious problems
to your General Ledger if changes are made to Costs associated with an item
on order while it is in the process. We have this with new items, where we
sometimes have items into process, before all their marbles have been
populated.
Suppose a new item is delivered, before we have populated it with the
standard cost. It goes into Inventory at Zero Value, and Unvouchered ($
value of purchases not yet paid for) also gets Zero. If this is not fixed
before Payables, then we have a HUGE material variance between actual cost
and expected cost. If this is fixed before payables, then we also need to
fix value of inventory, and value in unvouchered.
One problem is that there are no standard BPCS reports to identify items
needing such repairs. You have to add those.
Suppose we recieve an item in error ... wrong item, wrong quantity,
whatever ... and pay for it, then inventory management figures out the
error & tries to reverse the transaction. Too late, BPCS assumes the PO is
finished when we got the stuff, and paid for it. If you don't have a
system for followup, we can end up paying for the same product twice.
I created a work file ... summarize by vendor, PO, Item ... show quantity,
prices
(a) what we recieved
(b) what we paid for
then list discrepancies ... I found tons of cases where we were overbilled
& the Payable process did not catch it
In fact, this was such a big deal, that we changed how data flows into
General Ledger from summary to detail on selected inventory transactions,
to help us trouble shoot granularly by vendor and item what we were getting
and paying for.
We modified GLD230 Journal Dump to add more fields, such as from vendor
customer # what those vendors & customers names are (to help our auditors),
and reformatted the output into an Excel.
Thus, understanding how to reconcile costs in the flow of purchasing
transactions is an important ingredient. In a later installment, I may
share with you another area of gotchas in managing BPCS costs.
We are currently running on V4.03 and I have been asked to implement the
Cost Account function of BPCS. We currently have most of the modules
installed, but not necessarily using them to their full potential. Does
any one have any recommendations as to the best approach to implement
costing? Basically, we want to use a standard labor and overhead cost
for the entire year, plus actual material costs.
Are all the set ups necessary in BPCS to do this? I was told, going
forward, we will implement more and more of BPCS manufacturing, but not
right now. I know I can plow through the run manual for Costing, but
I'm hoping I can get some quick input from the community.
Thanks in advance -
Michael Perna
Business Systems Analyst - Finance
t. 310.832.8000 | f. 310.519.2605
P.O. Box 1950 | San Pedro, CA 90733 | USA, Earth
contessa.com <http://www.contessa.com/>
midrange.com
