If you haven’t upgraded to MISys 6.4.4, it might be just the reason you need to make the leap.

Have you ever created a new item to replace an old part, or required for a lot of assembled parts only to find out that you now have the daunting task of updating the long list of BOM’s with that new part number?

Running a successful manufacturing business requires managing a significant list of variables, and hopefully not too much of that list is dealing with corrective actions.

Making process outcomes more predictable is a primary objective of manufacturing improvement. In fact, predictability and the elimination of variance is so important that the engineering toolbox of Lean/Six Sigma emerged to help deal with it. As an example of the impact of variance in manufacturing, a production planner running a tight schedule would likely prefer that a purchased item quoted with 10-day lead time, reliably ships in 9 to 11 days, rather than somewhere in a range of 2 to 18 days, with price and all other factors being equal.

Like the removal of excessive packaging found on many purchased items, manufacturing value can often take some effort to isolate and get at. To help identify production value, establishing operational standards and comparing the output against those standards is an important first step.

If you have enabled the Multi-currency features of MISys Manufacturing, the Currency Services function stores the foreign currencies you wish to associate with your Suppliers and the default exchange rate between those currencies and your home currency.

Now is as good as a time as any to make sure your data is up to snuff.

The term Bill of Material (BOM) can be misleading because in many manufacturing systems, the BOM can contain not only Materials, but also Routing Operations like a recipe. When Material is combined with Operations, the Bill of Material is often referred to as a Bill of Manufacturing.

When evaluating opportunities for Improvement, there is a surprisingly simple mathematical principle that might help make some selections easier.

Improvement Projects and Manufacturing Control rely on good data to track progress. A straightforward way to get data from a Manufacturing System is with a data export. For example, the actual run times for an operation can be exported to excel in a few minutes. Once exported you can quickly run some basic statistical tests in Excel or Minitab to confirm the data is normally distributed around the mean, which includes detecting data outliers that could adversely impact decisions made from those results.

If you’re using MISys – you may want some clarification on exactly what these three assembly control accounts are for and when are they used in transactions.

If you’re using MISys – you may want some clarification on exactly what these control accounts are for and when are they used in transactions – “Scrap Adjustment” will also be included.