Release 4.26
Lead Times. There were basically two areas of enhancement in the lead time area.
You now have the ability to specify a Lead Time Adjustment value, which is added to the difference between the Order Date and Receive Date calculation. Example: Order is placed on January 11th and received on January 15th. In previous releases, K3S would have determined the lead time observation to be 5 days, by subtracting the Order Date from the Receive Date, and then adding a value of 1 (15-11 = 4, then add 1 to make 5 days). By doing this we are including both the Order Date and the Receive Date in the total Lead Time for that product. As you install this release, a new type of table code record will contain that adjustment value, and it will be initialized to contain a value of 1. This should be the right value for most customers.
Pre-process lead time observations. We now have the ability to pre-process lead time observations before the lead time forecasting process takes place once a month. What these programs do is to consolidate transactions, and remove any records with either a receive quantity of 0, or a negative receive quantity. What we have been seeing this year, is that technology is allowing the scanning of receipts out on the dock, and sometimes K3S is getting multiple transactions for the same PO, for the same Product, on the same Receive Date ! So instead of one transaction for a receive quantity of 50, we might get four transactions of 10, 5, 15, and 20 for receive quantities.
Data integrity. Certainly one of the most important areas that we continue to try and improve, is keeping clean data in K3S. There are 3 areas of concentration in this release.
Demand average. When the buyer changes the demand average, a new feature has been put into place that will check the size of the increase. When ever the adjustment to the demand average increases more than $100,000 a warning WINDOW will appear to ask if that large of an increase is correct. This feature becomes increasingly important when you move into the auto-replenishment world, where no user actually sees the approved purchase order until after the fact. The value of $100,000 is in a table and can be adjusted for your company.
Onhand value. During the past few months a couple of customers had situations where their receiving programs allowed extremely large values to go into their onhand. In most of these cases, a six digit value (probably a product ID) ended up as the received quantity, and then went into onhand. When K3S reviewed this information in the night job, our programs weren’t ready to handle such a large value of overstock. This has now been fixed, and we will identify the overstock, and just assign it a maximum value.
Hold Out Quantity. We now have a warning in place, that will look for entry values more than 50,000 in the Hold Out Quantity field. This value is in a table, and can be adjusted for your company.
Selected Products Review. We made several improvements to this area based upon feedback from customers.
A new type of batch you can create is called LDV – Low deviation %. The purpose of this new batch is to identify products that have very low demand deviation % values. We have found that during the conversion from INVEN (and DMAS I/M), many products brought with them demand deviation % values that are too low. These were typically slow moving products, with averages under 1 per period, where we would expect deviation % values above 90.0%, but can see values of 1.0% - 5.0%. Building a batch of these products makes it easy to identify and clean up the problem.
A new type of batch you can create is called Z00 - Profile with factor of 0.00 The purpose of this new batch is to identify products that have a seasonal profile assigned to it, and that seasonal profile has at least one factor with a value of 0.00 In some cases this could certainly be correct, that we don’t expect any demand during that period of the year. But for many of these products the profile needs to be removed or changed, because it was built in error.
The LTM – Lead Time Exceptions type of batch will now be built without any ‘D’ Discontinued products.
The OVR – Overstocked Products type of batch will now default to the ‘A’ All Locations screen.
Investment method. The K3S-Replenish system will now provide two investment methods when calculating the extra quantity to purchase from deals.
Method 0 – This is the default method that all customers have been using for the past few years, and all that has changed is the text for this method. It now describes that the sum of Order Cycle and Lead Time days are subtracted from the calculated Extra Days.
Method 1 – This method uses the same percentages to calculate the Extra Days as Method 0, but doesn’t have the sum of Order Cycle and Lead Time days subtracted from the total.
Auto-Replenishment Functions. This release contains all of the software pieces to take K3S-Replenish into the world of automated replenishment. To activate these functions, a few adjustments must be made to the interface where K3S will feed your PO System. We started testing these pieces earlier this year, and today about 60% of the dollar volume going through K3S at Bindley Western are done automatically. Bindley Western is the biggest user of K3S, with annual sales of $10 Billion.
F22=Create a new order. We have heard some customers request the capability to place multiple orders on the same day, with the same supplier. These customers didn’t realize that this capability has always existed. From the K3S_1010 screen, on the top line, key in the Buy Group, Location, and Supplier ID that you would like to create a new order for, and then press F22=. A WINDOW will appear to confirm that this is indeed what you would like to do. One change we have made to this function is this: the previous confirmation was to press ENTER to start the creation, and now the screen will require a second F22= to start the process. We changed this process to actually make it more consistent with other screens where you are asked if you would like to continue.
Supplier sub code processing. Although the supplier sub code (1 character value just after the 7 character supplier ID) has been in the K3S-Replenish database from the beginning design, not all of its capabilities were carried through the K3S programs. We would like to thank Roses Department Stores and Parts Central for helping us to ‘find’ the holes where our programs needed additional attention.
Hub-to-Hub processing. Our new acronym of H2H for Hub-to-Hub processing is now fully tested and running live at Bindley Western. Although Hub Transfer capabilities have been live since the beginning, and is running at several difference customer accounts, the H2H capabilities are new to this release. They allow K3S-Replenish to handle unlimited levels of distribution replenishment. Now you can purchase from your supplier into an east coast Hub distribution center, that can feed the east coast customers and other east coast distribution centers, as well as letting this east coast Hub feed a west coast Hub distribution center, that handles west coast customers and distribution centers. You can continue to re-distribute to lower and lower levels to fit your business needs.
Increase/decrease product averages globally. This new capability provides a vehicle where you can increase (or decrease) product averages globally because of business conditions, like taking on a new large customer. The Customer Usage System has been in K3S-Replenish since the beginning design, but many customers have never had a need to use it. This new feature may change that by allowing management to specify by percentage, the increase (or decrease) that should be applied to groups of products. These changes are then placed into the Product Forecast Log file for auditability.
Deal System improvements. Several areas were enhanced in the deal system.
External source entry. At Coastal Wholesale, they do not key in deals to K3S at all, but have them fed from their Customer Deal Entry programs. K3S provides an interface for this type of process.
Pass Customer Deal Information. At Barnes Wholesale, they key in Customer Deal Information at the same time they key in K3S deal information, and it gets passed to their Customer Deal file. K3S provides an interface for this type of process.
Auto Copy of Deals. At Bindley Western, when they activate a product for a division, and that product already had active deals at other divisions, then K3S automatically senses this condition, and adds the deal to this new product.
Distributed Entry. At Core-Mark, even though they have a centralized database for their many locations, each division manages their own deals, and therefore only views products for their location vs. having to view products for all locations.
All Locations Screen. The program K3S_8000 which shows all locations for a product, is a central vehicle for many K3S customers. We have had a few challenges displaying just the right products on this screen, because of various types of records that would exist in our product file. A few of these would be Alternate Source Product records, Combined Supplier Product records, Temporary Product records, and Hub Transfer Product records, and finally, day time added New Product Records. Anyway, we now believe we have resolved all of the conditions that would sometimes have interesting results on this screen. A few of the conditions that we were called about were 1) Locations showing in Red or Blinking, 2) Product Record appearing twice for the same location, and 3) Product not available to select for viewing.
