We’re trying to work out the best way to do this. Basically we want to be able to have jobs created with certain materials but when releasing the job, if there is insufficient quantity of the material on the job, it will allocate from the alternate part. This would then be the part in the material queue as well as job traveller (Also referencing the original part that it is substituting).
Management don’t want to have supplier part numbers that are different from out internal part numbers since then we will have what appears to be a discrepancy between what a forklift driver sees on the pallet and what has been requested to deliver.
We also want to avoid creating two different parts or revisions with the different materials since then we end up having to change orders, jobs, etc whenever we are using products from a different supplier.
Any Ideas how we can achieve this?
(this is actually a feature that one of our directors understood was available within Epicor)
It has been a while since we looked at this but we have a similar requirement we could never resolve- for example if need a 3 metre roll of rubber seal to do a job and we don’t have any 3 metres rolls in stock, but have 5 metre rolls with no demand, we would ideally like the system to suggest replacing this part - however I don’t think that out of the box the alternate parts work like this - much more to do with alternate parts you can sell rather than substituting material on a bom.
Be really interested if someone comes up with a solution.
For us, it is we have 500 kg oats from supplier A and 1200 kg oats from supplier B the job requires 1600 kg. As it stands, the job would need to be split into two jobs and then modify the new job to use the new material. This may be the same as your requirement, I guess.
The only solution I can come up with right now is to create a table extension to the PartLots to include a ‘Manufacturer Part Number’ field that would be populated upon receipt and then make that visible as well as the internal part number wherever required. Seems like a bit of a pain to setup though.
@AndrewM did you ever come up with a solution for this? We also understood that this functionality was native, but apparently not. I tried using the “issue material” functions for this purpose, but even though the MES will allow you to issue material from a different part number, Report Quantity consumes the full value of the original part inventory anyway resulting in consumption of both, or an error on negative quantity.
We thought of using the Lot functionality as well, but we want to use the alternates to phase out old parts (different drawings, materials, processes, etc), so the parts need to have separate records.
Report quantity only does this if you have the material set to backflush. If you uncheck that box, you can issue manually, and it won’t issue it again when you complete the operation.
This does require proper quantities of both the alternate part and the original part to be issued to the job if quantities of both are used. All I need to do now is make a BPM that limits the parts that can be issued to an MTL line to those that show as alternates.