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Anthony Etzel
/ Categories: Infor LX & BPCS Tips

BPCS/LX Tip of the Week: Understanding What Goes On – Out on the Factory Floor

Ok… so you want to know the status of a specific shop order that was released two days ago.

What do you do?


It’s a sure bet that you have a manager, supervisor, or planner who can walk the floor and find the order at whatever work center it happens to be at. He/she can then answer “what operations have been completed and how many were completed?” All this requires leg work, and of course, a fair amount of time.

Now, if you have setup your BPCS master files properly, and you report transaction activity, you should be able to get those shop order statuses much faster using the SFC300 Shop Order Inquiry Screen.

At your fingertips you can see:

  • Release date & due date
  • How many hours remain in total and at each operation
  • The quantity required, what was finished and the remaining quantity
  • What components (materials) have been issued

Pretty basic information, right? Are you getting what you need to know? If not, then you may want to reexamine how your BPCS files are setup and what transactions along with their frequency are captured.

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Anthony Etzel

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Tips:  LX | BPCS | M3

Understanding: How many hours remain in total and at each operation?

Now let’s look at what information is being supplied from the shop floor.

It’s not uncommon for transaction reporting to be captured manually on the shop packet that was issued to the factory floor when the SO was released.

The big question is, is anything done with the data? Is it collected and keyed to a  spreadsheet and not shared, or is the transaction data keyed to SFC600? If it is being keyed, ask how often and by whom? Some companies use alternative methods to capture transaction data that do not require batch keying via a keyboard.

Not a lot of data is required to be keyed to SFC600 in order for the SO Inquiry to be useful. The data that should be reported for the transaction process is as follows:

  • The type of hours being reported – machine, run labor, setup labor
  • If reporting setup and run labor you want an employee clock number
  • The shop order and the operation that is being reported
  • Is the operation complete
  • How many good were produced at this operation
  • How many hours – the numbers of hours are critical. Do the employees estimate how many hours they worked, or do they track actual time started and stopped in order to calculate the actual number of hours.

Based on what is captured and how often will have an impact on the SO inquiry screen. Understanding the batch times as to when the transactions are keyed will provide you with the window as to the SO status at that point in time. Or, are they keyed as they happen in a near real time fashion so that you can have a more current view of the factory floor.

Understanding: How many hours remain in total and at each operation?

First let’s look at some key BPCS Master File data starting with the routing file.

How many routing steps (operations) are set up that reflect how the product is produced in the factory? If you take a short cut and set up only one operation for the entire process, then you will limit the information seen on the SO inquiry program. Set up the operation steps to reflect what you want to report back to from the factory floor.

Will each of the routing steps run in one work center, or in different work centers? To keep it simple you may want to set up work centers as departments. For example:

  • Assembly
  • Machine
  • Paint
  • Etc.

For each operation setup consider how you have set up the following:

  • Load Codes – for example a code 5 is used if reporting both setup time and run labor time. These codes are maintained in the work center file
  • Basis Code – typical codes are P for pieces per hour,  3 is used for hours per 1,000 pieces
  • Setup hours – if you set them up, you also want to report them
  • Run hours – Direct Labor
  • Machine hours

How you set up th

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Tips: LN | Baan

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