Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

I started on a new task last Friday, and I thought it was pretty noteworthy. I am working with an industrial plastics injection facility that is going through a pretty arduous and painful transition to an enterprise resource management system. I think I’ve already mentioned my feelings on JD Edwards Enterprise Suck before.

Anyway, I started building a component that I found to be pretty simple to build but apparently is a pretty complex part of the business entity. I started working on a KanBan triggering system that automatically dispatches messages to buyers to either put through orders, or makes them aware that the vendor has fallen through on delivery. Every now and again parts change around, vendors drop the ball, or paperwork does not get received.

So it seems simple enough, get all on order record quantities, get all on hand balances, subtract away parts consumed within a given immanent period (2 weeks maybe), and then just put through a request for a calculated amount. This calculated amount is driven mainly off of the average number of units sold per given period of time (say a year) subtracted current amount demanded, and then offset this number by the current on-hand plus on-order. Baam you have your KanBan trigger quantity if you go under the offset quantity then you’ll want to order the number of calculated quantities calculated to the minimum purchase quantity. Minimum purchase quantity if you’re orders clamps that come in packs of 12 and you need 5 or 800.

That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. You’d be surprised what kind of statistics you can build off this information, if you can gather it together, and you’d be surprised how often or not the KanBan required quantities deviate from expectation. That’s why KanBan is around, but always remembers to assign a certain percentage of risk to each calculation because you could end up over ordering or under ordering, but if you mitigate the risk through the trigger calculated quantity you shouldn’t be too far off.