Changing a Part's Safety Stock
Safety Stock is a term for a buffer of stock which is used to protect the
manufacturing line from running out of parts. It is treated specially by
the system, and is almost counted as not being there for forecasting
purposes. It simply remains a (hopefully) undisturbed emergency reservoir
of parts, in case the normal stock levels should drop below xero for
whatever reason.
Recently (14.12.95), however, Safety Stock has been used (on trial)
automatically by the system for a new planning process. Due to this make
sure that Safety Stock is required and authorised
before adding it.
Adding Safety Stock
There are two ways of adding Safety Stock: as a flat quantity and as a
quantity based on a period's usage. For example, Safety Stock could be set
to, say, 5000 parts, or alternatively set to 4 days' usage, which would be
determined by the system every time POPLAN is run. The first situation is
actually changing the Safety Stock, the second changing the Safety Stock
Days.
To change Safety Stock, you must use Promis. The screen required is
called POPARM Maintenance and Review. It is option 6 from the
first Purchasing Menu. Once there the POPARM
MAINTENANCE menu is presented. What is needed is the second option,
MAINTAIN PLANNING PARAMETERS BY PART.
- Press F2 to use this. The next screen is quite a complicated array
of fields and variables, but thankfully it is only the first few fields
that are required to adjust Safety Stock.
- Enter the part number whose Safety Stock is to be changed and press
F2. The program automatically places the cursor in the second field of the
screen,
SAFETY STOCK
- At this point the procedure changes, depending on which method of using
Safety Stock is to be used/changed.
- To change Safety Stock to be a fixed number, enter
the number required in this field and press [TAB] twice to get the the
field entitled
DAYS.
- Blank this field
- OR
- To change the Safety Stock to a number of days, blank
the second field (
SAFETY STOCK) and press [TAB] twice to get
to the DAYS field.
- Enter the number of days Safety Stock required in this field.
- For either method, press F1 to process the changes and send the new
data to the system.
Having done this, just press F8 twice to return to the Purchasing
Menu.
Comments to Nik Makepeace