Hello, BaaN world.

New BaaN Board user here. Hope you all can help us.

We have the need to utilize extremely small quantities of material, on the order of microgram quantities (0.000001 gm), but the base unit for weight is kilogram. This is actually causing two issues (we are IVc4)

1. When trying to enter a conversion factor for kilogram to microgram, the system won't accept 0.000000001 or 1 x 10^-9. How do we get BaaN to recognize this conversion factor?

2. We would like to use gram as the base for all items so the warehouse personnel don't have to make conversions on the outbound advices, but BaaN in our current iteration only recognizes 4 significant digits to the right of the decimal point, and we would like 7 or 8. Is there a way to increase the number of digits that are recognized and used in the system for our tiny quantities?

Then we have the issue of the item specific conversion factors from nanomoles to micrograms, but that's a whole different story.

TedAtE5P,
This indeed is an interesting problem. The 'highest' conversion factor that I can enter into my system is 10^-7 which is not enough for your problem.
I guess the only way out is to use gramm (g) as the base unit for weight instead of kg.

Martin

Would it help to make use of the BOM Units in the item master? The field originates in EDM (if you use it) and carries over to Form 4 of Maintain Item Data. I've never used it so I can't go into details, but check help text (ITM has as better definition than EDM). The whole purpose of BOM Units is to allow use of very small quantities in BOMs.

Maybe somebody else out there has som experience with this?

Even if we use the BOM units, doesn't BaaN require that the conversion factor fall within it's parameters? So if our base unit is kg, and we need to use 10^-9 kg, we are outside what BaaN can handle. I will check this out on our test side, but it still seems that this is outside of what BaaN can handle.

Of course, we could get around this by using milligrams (mg) which is 10^-6 kg, and then use .000492 mg in the BOM, but this outside the four significant digits that we have. The only thing I can put in is .0005, and that much error is too much for our process. Does anyone know if we can increase the number of digits that BaaN uses beyone the 4 that we have (0.0000)?

Another idea that came up is to define the microgram (ug) as "per piece" and then put a conversion factor in that 1000 ug = 1 mg, but then we can't put in our item specific conversion factor of nanomoles, i.e. that 1 mg = 6.213 nmol for the individual item.

Any other ideas?

Don't know much, but learning fast...

Dear TedAtE5P,
Let me come back to my suggestion: what exactly is the base unit for weight in yor system? It's one of the basic paramters when you set up an Baan environment. You should find it somewhere in the tcmcs.. tables.

Martin

Martin,

The base unit for weight is kg, kilogram, and that is causing some of the problems, especially for the small quantities. However, BaaN is used on this installation by several different companies, and changing the base unit for our company may have far-reaching consequences with other companies in the global company. I don't know if it will be possible to change the base unit for our company and not for other companies. Possibly by setting up a new unit set, but this needs to be discussed with headquarters as well.

TedAtE5P,
You are absolutely right: changing the base unit for weight is not advisiable once your system is up and running. Basicly the base units are valid for each (logistic-) company. If you are not in an multisite environment it shouldn't affect the other companies on your system.
To my opinion it is the only Baan compliant solution for your problem. The base unit you need, should be right in the middle of all occuring values for weight. Conversion factors smaller and greater than 1 should cover those range of values.

Martin

About the only thing we can come up with is to create the ug (microgram) as a piece, not weight, then set up a global conversion factor to relate this back to mg (milligram). Then tie the nM (nanomole) to the ug via an item specific conversion factor. Thoughts on this approach, or is changing the base unit on a running system the only way to go?

TIA, Ted

What did you end up doing to resolve your problem?

We didn't really come up with a solution other than using the different quantities in the items. We are working in the test system right now to see how much trouble it will be to change the base unit of measure, and that may be the ultimate solution. No real solution to the significant digits issue yet, though.