Well we did it!! And I have to tell you that there is not enough paper in
this world to write all of the problems that occurred. My payroll/AR person
says you should consider investing in Rogain because your hair is going to
fall out in clumps
My question to your superiors would be, "why are you considering this
change?" Do you manufacture to stock or customer order? Do you have
approved methods of manufacture in place? Do you have accurate operation
standards? Vantage added standard costing as an after thought and as a
result many of the tools that are needed to analyze wip variances do not
exist. For example, there is no wip variance report explaining what the wip
variances consist of and why (I created my own in excel). Vantage has no
report advising what impact a standard cost change will have on the value of
inventory until after the roll up is complete. How do you capture your
labor? If you are using data collection do your employees clock in and out
properly, and log quantities accurately? Do you run big jobs with few
setups, or a lot of small jobs? Do you make the same parts repetitively or
continually make new parts? If you have varying production quantities the
part lot size will need maintained. Do you have a part numbering system?
Do you link jobs to sales orders? Do your employees know how to build to
stock, inspect, and ship from stock?
Our company always shipped from WIP and had no clue how to manufacture or
ship from stock. Our QA department still certs the order and not the job.
Our operation standards are not accurate but were entered to get Vantage up
and running quickly. We had no approved methods of manufacture because they
were unnecessary with an average cost system when the parts shipped from
WIP. Our parts master had eleven thousand parts that needed changed from
average to standard, eight thousand that were manufactured parts needing
ABOMs. Changing to standard in company configuration does not change it
globally, it must be done manually or a program written to uncheck average
and populate the standard field. Lot sizes need analyzed and determined or
the standard cost is the cost of manufacturing one part, which may or may
not be correct. Vantage allows purchase orders to be created and received
for parts without a standard cost. Jobs can get opened, manufactured to
stock, and the parts shipped without having an approved method of
manufacture and consequently a zero cost. I run queries every day to inform
me of any purchase orders open for parts with no standard cost, and of any
open jobs for parts without an approved method of manufacture or lot size.
The list goes on.
After all of that, all I can say is to think this out carefully. Our
experience does not need to be your experience. I don't know when your
fiscal year ends, and how many parts are in your part master, but this is
going take a lot of planning, possibly training, and a ton of work. Set a
realistic date for full implementation. Definitely upgrade to V4 and it is
my understanding that Cairo will have changes to the standard cost program.
Kathleen Harrington
SPS Non-Ferrous
-----Original Message-----
From: Troy Funte [mailto:
tfunte@...]
Sent: Friday, September 08, 2000 2:13 PM
To: Vantage
Subject: [Vantage] Average Costing to Standard Costing
My superiors want to convert from Average Costing to Standard Costing at the
fiscal year. I don't even know where to begin thinking and looking to find
what kind of trouble I'm going to get into. We are currently running 3.0,
evaluating 4.0 on the side.
Troy Funte
Liberty Electronics
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