Re: Shop base Manufacturing -- BPCS-L

       [George Sagan]
> With BPCS you will not get a flow where the Sales Order, Shop Order, Packing
>  List and Invoice all have the same number. You will get separate documents
>  that are relationally linked to the previous documents.

     [Al Macintyre]
George gave us a dynamite big picture on how this all fits together.

       [George Sagan]
>  I believe there is a way to trigger automatic creation of a
>  shop order at the time of order entry. This gives power to the order entry
>  clerks that in many environments would be reserved for production planners.

    [Al Macintyre]
I heard that too, but do not see it referenced in the 405 CD documentation - 
is it a V6 feature or an add-on offering?  It is possible that this is in 
some BPCS application we are not using, such as FAS or RCS.  We currently 
release our shop orders 2 of the 3 ways that we know about:

MRP launches what is needed on a grand scale
JIT can also launch but we are only using pieces of JIT & not this piece

Manual launches emergency customer orders & I am thinking we might want to 
explore this alternative - the sales person calls the production planner with 
the specifics, then the production planner launches the order - I am thinking 
that if the order entry could do it, only for emergency situations, then the 
shop order might already have a lot of the specifics that we now have to 
communicate interpersonally

      [George Sagan]
>. There is no direct drill down from a sales order into a shop order 
>   from the sales order inquiry screens.

    [Al Macintyre]
However from MRP inquiry on some item number in production you can peg to the 
sales order it is for & see the progress that is being made on the shop order 
in terms of materials & sub-components, but the best picture is from a 
mixture of inquiries.  SFC inquiry gives you detail on an individual order, 
and there is a way to view BOM of the part to see where you have bottlenecks 
in the planned arrival of raw materials.

There's ways to get data in & out of BPCS vs. Customers thru EDI - check the 
other threads
there are also AS/400 products to get Spool file reports & special forms into 
e-mail - check the other threads
There's a module for repetitive customer scheule releases, which we are not 
using

BPCS_L is wonderful in that Q & A inspire other thoughts by BPCS users as to 
what is doable.

We have had customers that wanted the bar code label on the product to 
include the invoice number that this shipment was being billed on, because 
they wanted to pay us based on the merchandise they received, rather than pay 
the invoice.  What we had been doing prior to this point was to apply the bar 
code to the product packaging, get all the shipping information on the 
shipping documents, ship the product out the door, then at end of day do the 
invoicing, so at time of bar code application we do not know what the invoice 
number will be.

We solved this on BPCS/36 but have not yet addressed the BPCS 405 
modifications that might be needed.  Basically, we figured out how to use the 
same number for invoice and shipping document - it was assigned at shipping 
time, so the bar code application could get it, then the invoice used the 
shipping number instead of assigning a new number.  In this case we had to 
have a bunch of invoices on the same customer, instead of one consolidating a 
bunch of shipments of related parts on the same day.

However,  Unbeaten Path's JIT Billing design makes it feasible to print 
invoices as your delivery vehicle is being loaded. After shipments are 
confirmed and bill of lading information is entered, orders are released in a 
batch for invoicing. Two
tedious invoice-by-invoice manual steps are skipped The design preserves 
internal control and information content while making it practical to print a 
truckload of bills of lading and invoices just-in-time. 

In BPCS 405 CD, the way we are currently doing shipping, the shipping 
document number is not automatically created - our people have to key in a 
unique number & what they are doing is 1st 2 digits are the warehouse 
shipping from, then the rest is a unique number that they manually assign 
based on the last one they assigned.  Sometimes there is human error.  They 
want a system that automatically assigns shipping document number, like we 
have with various other number systems in BPCS.  This is complicated by the 
sheer size of ORD590's family of programs, the fact that we do not have 
AS/Set, and my level of AS/400 competence here.

The users are anxious for this, but will just have to wait until my IBM 
education has further progressed into my brain.

When we ship abroad, they need a pro-forma invoice that includes a lot of 
info about the shipment, that we normally do not know until we are ready to 
make the shipment, such as weight & dollars, so we have a process of 
pre-figuring what it will be in those cases.  This includes the sample unit 
weight of the product, which is normally used for counting raw materials that 
might have 1,000 in a bin & we count 50 or some number to average out, but 
the end product has like torn off strips of masking tape, so we cannot 
scientifically predict the final weight from all the ingredients.

I was exploring this option for cases of errors in the shipping department.  
I thought that if we could get an approximate value of weight from the BOM 
multiplied against sample weights of all the ingredients, there should be an 
estimate of the weight of the final part - some place, I forget where we put 
it, we have the count of how many are supposed to be packed per carton.  So 
from this, someone in shipping would key in - we have 250 cartons of part-X & 
the math program says that should weigh about this poundage - well shipping 
was supposed to weigh that for the trucking manifest - and we would allow 
some margin for the materials to seal the cartons - either the true total 
weight is in the right ball park or it is not - if it is not then you have 
not allowed for the skid that all of this is on, or the cartons were not 
counted right, or the part that is in there is not the part that you thought 
it was.

We are still debating this idea

Al
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