Re: Fiscal Year Change in BPCS

I suggest you get from the people who normally do end-fiscal, an estimate of
how long it runs. You'll need to ask IT people, accounting people, and
others whose normal routine gets disrupted at that time of year.

You'll need to know which tasks can be run at same time as normal other
users, which require restricted system, or can be done with semi-restricted.

Your issues will not just be time to do the conversion, but also identifying
things people do, based on calendar year, which may need to be altered, to
now be based on fiscal year.

For us, our customer service people use YYYY-12-31 as a magic date to
contain non-real customer orders within customer orders, for total contract
requirements, to feed into MRP raw materials, then when we get real orders,
they subtract their quantity from the magic date total. Several of our
modifications ignore anything in YYYY-12-31 because we know we have a
mountain of phony data there. You'll need to know if this kind of "doing
something special at year end" will remain on calendar year, move to fiscal
year, or get re-thought, but start with an inventory of all anythings like
that in your system.

Find out which tasks tend to run long time frames, which may be required in
vicinity of end fiscal.

For us, shop order purge, cost rollup, and some modifications, each take 1-4
hours, many should not be running con-currently on different JOBQ. This
weekend is our end-month, so I ran some of this stuff Wed & Thur nites, so
as to have very current contents Fri nite, without having more to do Fri
nite than there are hours between clerical leaving Fri, and arriving Sat.

I have recently done much of this on BPCS 405 CD, where we have: vanilla;
modified; auditor involvement.

We only have to deal with 1 long shift clerical (various people arriving
before 5 am, others leaving after 5 pm) 5 day week, occasional weekend. You
need to review your people schedules. Do you have time chunks for
end-fiscal etc. when you don't need to be chasing people off the system,
because they normally are not on the system?

People who do not work with end-fiscal have no comprehension of how
disruptive it can be for them to be doing normal input right around time of
end-fiscal.

End-Day typically takes us 1-2 hours human (billing, GL, communicate
totals), then load JOBQ (MRP etc.).

End-Month can be done on a weekend. I start Fri nite, usually finished Sun
mid-day, except for the AS/400 reports they need in Excel.

I can check what Sat crew did, to see if any Fri nite reports need to be
rerun. Typical Sat clerical crew is updating customer orders, which has no
impact on our end-fiscal reports or totals.

End-Year vanilla goes extremely fast, but we can't do final GL close until
auditors finished with fiscal year just ended, but BPCS has an end of
universe restriction on how much time they may use. I want to do that from
computer room because VPN flakey. I'd hate to have to deal with
consequences if lost connection in middle of this thing which takes about 1
hour to run, cannot put it on JOBQ.

We do physical inventory last week of fiscal year, which is also calendar
year. We have to shut down factory for this, it typically takes 3-4 days
for the people doing the counting. The vanilla reports go fast, it is our
modifications which are time consuming, but most of that time is on JOBQ.

The physical inventory also involves what we do about open shop orders,
which is time consuming, for our people, to manage.

Another modification thing we do at end fiscal year is replace standard
costs. Basically we replace material cost with actual, then roll it up.
However, we also get frozen copies of prior year standard and actual. This
latest 2 years frozen, because our new auditors are doing 2011-2013, to
compare 2011 with 2012. So we have to be prepared to run reports with
retroactive costs and inventory. For example I am now working on a new
report for the new auditors, showing physical inventory (from Dec 2012)
using 2012 standard costs.

I am able to do that, because I archived key files before the end-fiscal
physical and year processes wiped out contents of those files, such as YTD
totals, and the physical tag file, and before new year transactions updated
data as-of-year-end.

I have been able to persuade the powers that be to be finished with cost
updates and input, with sufficient time for me to do what needs to be done,
before EOY deadline.

Some tasks must be done right around time of end fiscal, physical inventory,
as part of the process. Some can be done days in advance, days after.

For example, I had a simulation cost with 2013 standard prepared in advance,
because clearing then copying a cost set goes much faster than copying, then
rollup, and I had a heck of a lot other things to do on EOY weekend.

Also we have modifications dependent on the fiscal year being a calendar
year, and how we have structured our archives. For example a sales detail
report, slow moving inventory report, non-moving inventory.

So you might review any assumptions, how your business functions, in your
modifications, since some assumptions are about to change.

Also review what's on automatic scheduler. You may need to record what's
scheduled, not on hold, then put most or all of it on-hold during end
fiscal, then release again when you are done. Not all the automatically
scheduled stuff is on GO CMDSCDE. We also have GO CLEANUP; GO POWER; GO
BACKUP; disk statistics; and interactions with another division of our
company on another AS/400.

Al Mac (WOW) = Alister William Macintyre
via WOW WAY.com ISP
day job = www.kewire.com Lawrenceville In via VPN/400 (our division dates
back to 1955)
-----Original Message-----
From: bpcs-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:bpcs-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Bailey, Dick
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2013 9:57 AM
To: BPCS ERP System
Subject: [BPCS-L] Fiscal Year Change in BPCS


On 3/31/2014 our company will change from a calendar year fiscal year to a
fiscal year ending 3/31. We have time to prepare and want to anticipate
what needs to be done.

For those who have done something similar, what do we need to anticipate
that we wouldn't necessarily think of? Did anything catch you by surprise?

Dick Bailey
MCFA, Inc.