MAC-PAC XEModule Descriptions

MAC-PAC XE™ Module Descriptions Table of Contents

Engineering Management ...................................................................................................................... 2

Design Engineering......................................................................................................................... 2 Manufacturing Engineering ........................................................................................................... 2 Bill of Documents .......................................................................................................................... 2

Manufacturing Resource Planning....................................................................................................... 3 Master Scheduling .......................................................................................................................... 3 Requirements Planning.................................................................................................................. 3 Capacity Planning ........................................................................................................................... 3

Materials Management........................................................................................................................... 4 Inventory Control.......................................................................................................................... 4 Transfer Control............................................................................................................................ 4 Purchasing ........................................................................................................................................ 5 Repetitive Supply............................................................................................................................ 5

Production Management....................................................................................................................... 6 Shop Floor Control ....................................................................................................................... 6 Just-in-Time ..................................................................................................................................... 6 CONBON ....................................................................................................................................... 6

Cost Management .................................................................................................................................. 7 Product Costing ............................................................................................................................. 7 Inventory Accounting.................................................................................................................... 7

Job Management ..................................................................................................................................... 8 Job Control...................................................................................................................................... 8 Job Costing ...................................................................................................................................... 8

Customer Service Management .......................................................................................................... 9 Order Processing ........................................................................................................................... 9 Expert Configurator ....................................................................................................................10 Sales Analysis.................................................................................................................................10 Synchro...........................................................................................................................................11

Financial Management..........................................................................................................................12 General Ledger .............................................................................................................................12 Accounts Payable .........................................................................................................................12 Draft Management .......................................................................................................................12 Accounts Receivable....................................................................................................................13

Electronic Data Management.............................................................................................................14 Electronic Data Collection.........................................................................................................14 Electronic Data Interchanges.....................................................................................................14

Activity Management ...........................................................................................................................14 Business Process Manager..........................................................................................................14

MAC-PAC XE Modules

Engineering Management

Design Engineering

This module maintains the product specification data needed to manufacture a company's products. It allows design personnel to develop accurate and timely specifications for new products, maintain engineering changes to existing products, and minimize obsolescence through effective engineering change controls and item standardization procedures. Standard containers are defined and tracked for the just-in-time (JIT) pull environment. Items are designated as either just-in-time or discrete, thereby allowing control over the mix of JIT and MRP processes for a factory.

Manufacturing Engineering

This module allows plant personnel to develop and maintain current routings for all manufactured items. Plant facilities are organized into work centers, and product costs are minimized through effective control of methods and standards changes.

Bill of Documents

The Bill of Documents module allows you to track specifications for a manufactured item or manufacturing process. Through Bill of Documents inquiries and reports, you’ll be able to see the relationship between parts and documents.

MAC-PAC XE Modules

Manufacturing Resource Planning

Master Scheduling

With this module, master schedulers can translate product family production plans into an item-level master production schedule. They can also plan key components to support assemble-to-order production and monitor key production resources necessary for meeting the established master production schedule. As a result, a master scheduler can develop a realistic master production schedule that tells what products to manufacture, when to produce or purchase them, and in what quantities. The master schedule can be expressed using lot-sized orders for MRP items or orderless supply rates for JIT items.

Requirements Planning

This module plans the supply of components to meet demand. It operates in either a selective, net change, or a regenerative mode and is bucketless. It allows you to generate and maintain a simulated schedule, giving you the ability to perform "what if" analysis. It has an unlimited planning horizon and provides planners with timely exception/order action reports. For items designated for ERP production, it creates, changes, and deletes planned orders to meet demand. The orders can be planned using a variety of lot sizing techniques. For JIT items, it creates, changes, and deletes orderless supply rates to meet item demand. This rate planning technique better reflects repetitive JIT production and can be tailored to specific JIT environments with a variety of options.

Capacity Planning

In an MRP environment, this module provides load versus capacity information by summarizing time-phased load requirements by work center. This allows management to plan and monitor labor and machine requirements and adjust planned resource capacities.

Load information is based on the status of all orders in process or on planned production orders created in the Master Scheduling, Requirements Planning, and Inventory Control modules. Detail load reports and on-line graphic inquiries provide work center labor and machine load by item, order, operation, and time period. Over-capacity situations are highlighted. This information helps planners determine which orders to reschedule or reroute. For JIT parts, capacity planning is performed by Just-in-Time and CONBON techniques.

MAC-PAC XE Modules

Materials Management

Inventory Control

The Inventory Control module maintains the accurate on-hand and on-order inventory balances needed to implement company-established inventory policies. Fully integrated with other modules, it automatically reacts to changes in product design, component availability, and customer demands. Unnecessary paperwork is eliminated because reports are produced on an exception basis to inform or remind you of situations that require your attention.

Items can be tracked by lot number for purchase receipt through customer shipment. On-line inquires provide an accurate, timely picture of inventory balances – by location, lot and balance type. If appropriate for your environment, you can view quantities in stock keeping units, based on physical quantity, or in active units, based on the potency. To help predict shortages, you can view the time-phased availability of any item based on purchase orders, customer orders, and manufacturing requirements. Finally, it provides you with flexible control over your inventory by supporting both periodic cycle counting and full physical inventory. Some reports produced include cycle counting reminders and material shortage notifications.

Transfer Control

The Transfer Control module provides the communication capabilities essential to efficient material replenishment in a multiple warehouse environment. When a required component is stocked at another warehouse, the Requirements Planning and Master Scheduling modules generate a transfer requisition to meet the requirement. In addition, warehouses can communicate replenishment requirements and activity by entering on-line material transfer requisitions. Approved requisitions are then covered by transfer orders. Detailed transactions at each warehouse track quantities of inventory that are expected, shipped, received and scrapped. These quantities are reconciled before requisitions and orders are automatically closed.

MAC-PAC XE Modules

Materials Management (cont’d) Purchasing

This module manages all purchasing functions. Item/vendor relationships are established and statistics are maintained on delivery performance, price performance, and quality performance. A quote maintenance feature allows for the development of multiple quotes for each item/vendor relationship. The procurement process begins with requisitions for purchased material. Requisitions can be entered manually, if desired, or are generated automatically by the planning modules. The requisitions are then covered either manually or automatically with purchase orders.

In a JIT environment, blanket orders represent the long-term agreement between customer and supplier. The procurement process ends with the receipt of items, a quantity control count, and an optional quality control check. Purchase orders, purchase order acknowledgements, and vendor shipping documents can be transmitted and received electronically through the EDI module. When invoices are received, the Accounts Payable module matches the invoices against the original orders and purchase order receipts.

Repetitive Supply

The Repetitive Supply module is a just-in-time supply chain management solution that is designed to handle the ordering and receipt of deliveries from vendors in an efficient and individually tailored manner. In conjunction with the Requirements Planning and Purchasing modules, Repetitive Supply allows planners to plan and order a steady flow of goods on an as-needed basis. It also offers you flexibility in implementing contract pricing for specific vendors, items and time periods.

MAC-PAC XE Modules

Production Management

Shop Floor Control

This module helps production management schedule, release, and track production orders for MRP manufactured items. It also helps isolate scrapped and reworked materials and monitor and evaluate direct and indirect labor performance. The Process Definition module defines, organizes, and maintains the standard operations needed to complete manufacturing orders for each item. These operations can then be modified through Shop Floor Control on an order-by-order exception basis. This enables production personnel to make unique individual production runs.

Just-in-Time This module allows manufacturers to change production quantities and adjust JIT

production rates. It supports on-line and load simulation for "what-if" analysis and mixed-model scheduling for manufacturing cells. Once the optimal production schedule has been developed, it can be firmed through to the date of a firm time fence. The other planning modules will not automatically reschedule production within the firm time fence; planner intervention is required. The firm time fence can be set globally, or at the item level. Flexible inventory movement features let manufacturers tailor point-of-use receipts and inventory relief to their environments. For example, component inventory may be back flushed through multiple levels of the bill of material. Operation-level inventory relief is supported for manufacturers with long lead times.

CONBON (Card Order Notice, Bring Out Notice)

The CONBON module is MAC-PAC XE’s software support for the Kanban production technique. This technique involves the pull execution of the production plan. CONBON is a production execution method that uses production and movement cards to replenish items as they are consumed in the production process.

Using item and cell parameters, the system suggests the number of CONBON cards needed to support smooth production. In this way, the module helps you control production surplus and safety stock, while reducing lead times and inventory balances. The cards can be printed on-line or off-line in either a worker-readable or bar-coded format. CONBON is used for JIT-planned items only, taking the place of the Shop Floor Control module.

MAC-PAC XE Modules

Cost Management

Product Costing

This module maintains product cost data for all raw materials, parts, subassemblies, and end items either produced or purchased. An unlimited number of cost elements can be defined for each item. The module maintains material, labor, and overhead costs in forms such as standard, current, simulated, and, in some environments, moving average costs. Product costs can be reported as standard costs, moving average, or as actual/standard if job control is invoked. Accounting personnel use these costs to evaluate price and profit margins, established budgets to measure performance, identify variances, develop plans for future operations, and perform “what-if” analysis on product costs. The standard labor and overhead rates from the work centers are maintained by the Manufacturing Engineering module.

Inventory Accounting

This module accounts for changes in inventory balances and records the costs of inventory adjustments and shrinkages. Flexibility is provided for accounting period closings and for printing a wide selection of reports. You can begin to enter transactions for a fiscal period before performing period-end processing for the preceding period, as all transaction processing is date driven. Even if period-end processing for period A is performed in the middle of period B, only transactions applying to period A are costed. Inventory Accounting provides data directly to the General Ledger module.

MAC-PAC XE Modules

Job Management

Job Control

The Job Control module allows you to track all manufacturing activity by job number—from when a job number is assigned at order entry time until the finished product is shipped. You have access to up-to-date status information on purchasing, manufacturing, and inventory activity for any job anywhere in the organization.

Job Costing

The Job Costing module calculates all material, labor, overhead and miscellaneous costs incurred to complete a job. You can also enter any additional charges related to the job. For work in process, the module projects total job cost based on cost to-date and percentage complete. Access to accurate cost information helps you improve profitability and provides a basis for estimating future work costs.

MAC-PAC XE Modules

Customer Service Management

Order Processing

This module provides sales order entry and performs the shipping, billing, and general customer service functions of a business. The sales order subsystem maintains customer information and provides status for quotations, regular orders, blanket orders, and backorder releases. From order entry through shipping, customer orders are processed on-line. Inquiries allow you to track the status of each order. Orders can be priced using contracts, standard warehouse prices, or customized price lists. You can also choose to enter prices manually. You can define price lists in any currency and can maintain prices on a mass basis to facilitate price conversions. A pricing template feature allows you to relate price lists and discounts to customers, orders, and part characteristics, giving you the flexibility you need to define pricing and discounting strategies. MAC-PAC XE also supports customer discounts such as percent discount, quantity price break, and no-charge (for a sample order). Additionally, volume, header, and line-level discounts can be defined with effectivity dates. These discounts can be applied directly to sales orders or will be automatically applied using discount templates. Pricing and discounting templates facilitate the automatic retrieval and application of price lists and/or discounts. Templates match pre-defined order, customer, and line-related characteristics with the orders created in MAC-PAC XE. A few examples include pricing group, customer class, order class, bill-to/ship-to, as well as four user-defined pricing keys. MAC-PAC XE supports multiple options for sourcing customer orders. Orders can be taken at one site and shipped from another directly to the customer, without having to re-enter information at each location. The remote site can be a distribution warehouse, a manufacturing plant, or even a vendor. You can consolidate shipments into loads, and highlight loads where the estimated weight and volume exceed capacity of the planned shipping method. You can consolidate shipments from multiple orders into one picking document. The shipping workbench allows you to record the shipment of inventory as well as create bills of lading, packing lists, and shipping labels from one easy-to-use conversation. If goods must be returned, the Order Processing module allows you to assign a return merchandise authorization number, record the receipt, adjust inventory, create a credit memo, and send a replacement shipment in a single conversation. For each order, the system maintains records of the quantity shipped, creates billing documents, and updates Accounts Receivable. This information is then used in the Sales Analysis module to track sales activity.

MAC-PAC XE Modules

Customer Service Management (cont’d)

Expert Configurator

The Expert Configurator module helps you manage the sales and manufacturing process in make-to-order or assemble-to-order environments. Maintaining information for items that offer many features and options can be difficult. The Expert Configurator allows you to define rules indicating what options are available and how each option affects design and price. Rules are used to individualize the order entry process interactively-data entry personnel are prompted only for information appropriate to options the customer has already chosen. The rules are also used to determine product price. Because all of the information is available on-line, data entry personnel can quickly answer customers' questions about what option combinations are available and how much they will cost. In manufacturing environments, rules also specify labor and component requirements and manufacturing method. When a custom order is received, the Expert Configurator module generates production orders with specific component and labor steps and purchase requisitions with configured specifications. Product costs can be generated based on the unique bill of material and routing configured for the order.

The rules you define can be changed at any time; replaced rules are maintained with version numbers, should a need ever arise to retrieve past product design or pricing methods.

Sales Analysis This module meets the functional requirements for capturing customer activity,

tracking sales, monitoring sales performance, comparing prior and current year statistics, and enforcing management policy. It allows for timely management reporting and detailed budget control, with support for controlling exceptions. Budgets for financial, statistical, and gross margin data can be compared to actual sales figures through reports and on-line inquiries. Sales transactions resulting from order processing, shipping/billing, and post billing functions provide the detailed information for analyzing sales and printing reports as well as for accumulating total sales by period.

MAC-PAC XE Modules

Customer Service Management (cont’d)

Synchro Synchro is a just-in-time distribution solution that is designed to handle frequent

deliveries to high-volume customers in an efficient and individually tailored manner. Originally developed for the automotive industry, Synchro applies to a broad range of manufacturing and distribution environments. It receives electronic delivery requests, splits and offsets them according to the customer's delivery rules, feeds demand into MAC-PAC XE, prints customer shipping labels, creates shipping lists, sends invoices and shipping lists, and maintains detailed customer synchronization data to ensure the shipped quantities are accurate. Delivery requests, shipping lists, and invoices can be communicated electronically, using a variety of electronic data interchange standards. Even if you choose not to use EDI, Synchro gives you the power and flexibility to become a just-in-time supplier for your customers.

MAC-PAC XE Modules

Financial Management

General Ledger This module gives you a flexible and clear presentation of critical financial

information. It receives data from manual and reversing journals, entries from other accounting systems, intercompany journals, and recurring and standing journals. Data is captured and transferred directly by other modules (such as Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and Inventory Accounting) or entered manually through journal entries. All general ledger transactions can be traced back through the journal to the originating document or payment record. Data such as account balances, statistical data, budget data, and historical data is maintained on the database. You can measure planned-versus-actual performance for each unit in your organization, control many budgets and periods simultaneously, and post on demand. This information can be extracted by the report writer to product reports that meet your business needs.

Accounts Payable

This module supports several flexible methods of defining payment terms and discount deductions. When invoices are entered, a three-way match facility may be used to match invoices to purchase orders and receipts from the Purchasing application. Matching variances are automatically captured and accounted for. Cash forecast lists all items scheduled for payment according to user-specified payment cutoff dates. To simplify the payment process, the system can automatically generate checks, remittance advices, and maintain information regarding manually prepared checks. Vendor histories provide a complete analysis of all transactions for each vendor.

Draft Management

MAC-PAC XE supports a wide range of payment methods, including bank drafts. The Draft Management module processes drafts received from customers. The module manages the entire bank draft process-- from draft creation and approval through application and remittance. Drafts can be created automatically when open items are created in any of MAC-PAC XE's modules. Pre-approved drafts can be applied automatically, and an automated selection process simplifies the task of remitting drafts to the bank. Drafts can be remitted electronically or on paper. Draft Management supports transactions to account for draft risk, discounts for remitting drafts not due, and the expense of claimed back or unpaid drafts. This flexible module provides all features required to do business in countries where customers commonly use bank drafts to pay their obligations.

MAC-PAC XE Modules

Financial Management (cont’d)

Accounts Receivable

This module processes customer payments and maintains payment history information based on your organizational structure. It gives you the information you need to track one of your most important assets and improve collectabiity. Customer invoice and payment transactions are entered through an on-line data entry conversation or are created by the Order Processing module. The Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) module allows MAC-PAC XE to send invoices electronically. Full validation and posting are performed on-line, ensuring that you can always access the most up-to-date data. A combination of credit management reports and on-line conversations provides you with an interactive tool for managing credit information. You can review customer credit information including payment history, outstanding invoices, and aging amounts. For corporate customers, you can view credit history for each sub-entity as well as the total commitment for the corporation. Credit checking can also be performed at either the sub-entity or the corporate level. Based on past customer performance, Accounts Receivable creates a report listing open items expected to be paid within a specific time range, giving you visibility into your organization's cash flow. If credit problems occur, MAC-PAC XE can produce multiple levels of running messages and letters to improve collectability. Cash can be applied on-line to specific documents, on account, to a list of documents, to the oldest document, or any combination.

MAC-PAC XE Modules

Electronic Data Management

Electronic Data Collection

The Electronic Data Collection (EDC) module helps you save time and prevent errors usually associated with the manual data entry process. Personnel who would normally enter line after line of inventory information and labor information need only run a wand across a system-printed bar code. Data entry errors are reduced, avoiding any serious inventory valuation errors, and workers are free to spend more time on other activities-generally improving customer service.

Electronic Data Interchanges

The Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) module allows MAC-PAC XE to communicate directly with the application software used by your customers and vendors. It can receive sales orders from customers electronically and transmit sales order acknowledgments, bills of lading, and invoices. On-line conversations allow you to correct any invalid transmissions easily. By minimizing data entry, EDI improves accuracy and efficiency--allowing you to focus on activities that add value for your customers. The module supports a variety of common EDI standards.

Activity Management

Business Process Manager

The Business Process Manager (BPM) module is a customizable work management tool that allows you to define business events and how they should be monitored, the specific users to be notified when those events occur, and a set of standard actions that can be taken to act upon those events.