The Bee Hive

Dear Santa,

I know it's way too early to pen my Christmas wish in September, but I want to make sure I give you sufficient lead time so you can keep those elves run your MRP early.

I’ve been a warrior in the manufacturing wars for more than 30 years and always have been a very good boy. Of course, there was the incident of the cost accountant’s hard drive, the one he used to calculate efficiency/utilization percentages. But no one could prove I was the one who slipped glue into the RAM slots because I was far away by the time it hardened and fused the PC’s innards.

And there was the time the computer file was changed to zero percent commission for all orders irresponsibly promised with insufficient lead time. The sales reps were really upset and, in spite of their accusations, I still contend that my refusal to take a lie detector test was based on personal convictions about civil liberties.

So, as I said, I’ve been good enough this year and that’s why I’m asking for a new shop calendar for Christmas. For the past 30 years, I’ve worked with various MRP/ERP software products, both mainframe and PC-LAN based, and in spite of tremendous improvements in speed and functionality, it’s always the same old, low functionality shop calendar. It’s like if you were shopping for a new car and, no matter how expensive and elegant, none was available with more than an old AM radio; no FM, no DVD player with customizable parent-control dashboard.

This is why shop calendars in most MRP/ERP packages don’t work very well. In your own toy factory, you manufacture wooden rocking horses by the thousands. You know how the elves can hardly keep up with the demand for the horse leads that are precision cut on the hand saw. On the other hand, the hand and foot pegs that keeps the kids from falling off run on the automatic saw, which is never a constraint.

So if you decide to run the hand saw three shifts, and change the shop calendar accordingly, a subsequent capacity analysis will reflect the reality of the hand saw but will grossly overstate the capacity on the other work centers that you wish to run just one shift. Eventually, overstatement of capacity on non-constrained work centers will disguise that a work center is approaching the limit of what it can produce on the one shift it is working. Or you can leave the shop calendar alone and isolate the confusion to the constrained work centers – but that’s where you need more help, not more confusion!

So you see, Santa, the traditional shop calendar that establishes workdays/non-workdays for the entire factory only works when every work center requires approximately the same number of hours per day and days per week. I want a new shop calendar that provides separate calendars for every work center. With this, you could schedule your hand saw to work three shifts, six days per week and your automatic saw one shift, four days per week. I could really keep a tight rein on capacity this way. And, because my routings typically both contain machine hours required and labor hours, I ought to be able to specify whether demand upon a work center is calculated by machine or labor hours. I know this is a bit much, Santa, but some software packages already offer this, most do not.

As long as I’m asking, let’s also treat receiving and shipping as work centers and give each its own shop calendar. The receiving calendar would control which dates are allowed to be due dates on Pos and the shipping caledar would control which dates are allowed to be ship dates on COs. And I could work just the receiving area on tose days when I’m getting parts in place for a start-up after an extended shutdown.

If you give me a shop calendar, Santa, I’ll even forget about the pony you didn’t give me when I was eight years old. If you can’t build one in time for Christmas, or if you decide to hold my past against me, at least give a copy of this letter to the software developers on your list, so perhaps my next software package will have a fully functional shop calendar built in. if you choose this route, however, you still owe me a pony…except this time, I’d like to have Jessica Alba on it as well.