I did some searching but did not find extensive answers on what these parameters are referring to. Can anyone explain how the values apply to jobs? I’m not in job costing so a majority of this stuff is Greek to me. I was asked by our Controller to setup a 20% across the board, This is what we entered, but I’m not sure if it’s correct or not. We’ve been testing it on our training DB and I have seen this process automatically complete, and then close 3 jobs that are not marked as complete. Any idea why it would do that? I do not have any auto complete parameters setup or applied to any product groups.
In some of the testing I have done, I found that if you have all those items populated then it is quite strict, and the individual line items will overrule the Job Cost as a whole. It seems like you would have to pick which one is more important, the individual items, or the job as a whole, at least in relation to auto closing.
In my first test with all items listed at 20%, it closed out 98 jobs, 3 of which it also auto completed and closed, they were not marked complete prior to running the auto close process.
My second test with only the Job Cost at 20% it closed out 225 jobs and this time it completed 12 jobs and closed them that were not completed prior.
Both tests were run on the exact same data, same set of 562 Completed/Open jobs, with 1,695 total just open jobs.
No one has any refined information on this?
I find it crazy that Epicor doesn’t have this outlined in their user guides on how it works, or how to set it up.
On top of that I contacted ComTec, our local consultant since I figure opening a call would result in Epicor saying to contact a consultant, and they are trying to sell me full on training courses for Job Management or Job Costing as a whole. I can’t justify that cost when I only need to know how to operate one function of the whole system.
I may just start a call with Epicor since when you process the Auto Job Closing function I’ve seen it auto complete and close some jobs. Shouldn’t it only be closing the already completed jobs? Especially since I don’t have auto completing setup. These are the things I need info on.
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If I had a controller say “Auto Close Jobs 20% across the board” I wouldn’t know what to do as that is not very specific. 20% of what? Cost, Qty? Whole Job Costs or specific components of the Job? And should it be 20% under or over estimate? My guess would be that they are referring to the total Job Cost when they refer to ‘across the board’ and they probably mean within 20% of the estimated cost. Now the question is over or under the estimate… probably under.
So let me see if I can explain.
What you have setup in your screenshot is going to create very confusing results since you have a value in every parameter, too many variables.
So you have 4 areas that are evaluated by the process:
- Materials
- Operations
- Subcontract (operations)
- Total Job Cost
With the first three you can provide thresholds for Qty and/or Cost described as a percent. Any jobs that have variance values that are within these thresholds will NOT be closed.
The last one is the threshold for the Total Job cost variance as cost.
So the way yours is setup, if there is any Material, Operation, Subcontract Qty or Cost variance over or under 20% will not close. Only anything in between a variance of under 20% or over 20%. In addition your Job Cost says that any total Job Cost variance that is less than $20 or more than $20 close. If you specify either Job Cost value the total Job Cost variance is first evaluated by the process and then the others. The Jobs Cost is not evaluated as a percent, but as a cost amount. It is setup this way so that cost accountants can specify both elemental ranges and a total range since it is possible that each element could be met for auto close but the total job cost be further than a cost accountant is comfortable with. For instance, say your Materials and Operation were both 20% over in Qty or cost but accounting doesn’t want to auto close anything where the total job cost variance is over $1,000. I could be possible that you could have a $5,000 Job Cost Variance and still be in tolerance of the material and operations individually.
When I first started helping clients with this I just used the Field Help and the Applicaiton Help.
I opened up Field Help and selected each field and read up on each. Then I reviewed the Application help as well.
Hope that helps.
I’m going to review your post some more and see if I can make more sense of it, I know nothing about Job Costing so it’s very foreign to me.
I’ll report back later. Thanks!
I forwarded the Help Field descriptions to our CFO to see if he can make sense of what they are saying, and then hopefully provide me with some numbers to try. As noted before, even after reading all of that, I’m not sure what he wants to see happen exactly so I don’t know what numbers to try.
For some reason I did not find those field help descriptions the first time I went looking for them and I don’t know why. They came up this time and it seems way more defined than I remember seeing before.
So we’ve been running a few tests with revised settings since we now know that the Job Cost is a dollar value and not a percentage like the rest it seems to be working better. We are seeing more expected results in the logs now vs all of the jobs saying its outside the job cost threshold. The only thing that is still throwing me for a loop is the fact that during the auto closing process it will auto complete a handful of jobs. I have a list of 7 jobs that were auto completed and closed during the auto closing process.
Also the Auto complete and Auto close exception job lists are odd with what jobs they are reviewing during the process.
What job criteria has to be met for the auto complete/close process to look at it? We are noticing that the job closing exception list is including jobs that are not even completed yet. As well as the Completion exception list is including jobs that aren’t candidates for completion. It seems odd that these processes would look at and process jobs that aren’t even ready for that step yet.
I’m not sure about Jobs being marked as complete automatically during the Job Closing process. There are two separate Processes to do each, one is Auto Job Complete and the other is Auto Job Closing.
Here are some things I would check:
- Do you have other Job Complete/Close Parameter Codes setup? (you probably do)
-Are any enabled for ‘Job Completion?’
-Check all your Product Groups for any assignment of the Auto Job Complete Codes
When the Auto Job Close process is ran you may notice there is no way to select which Parameters Code to select, that is because it runs against all ‘Candidate Jobs’ and then uses the appropriate Parameter Code per the Job’s Product Group (or the Default code).
So, what is a Candidate Job? Usually it is any Job where one of either:
- The last operation is complete.
- A packer is created (non-stock part).
- The top level part is moved to inventory.
You can see all the Candidate Jobs in the Job Closing screen. When doing a Job Search change Job Filter to ‘Candidate.’ Auto Job Complete & Closing processes only review the Candidate Jobs.
So what you see in the Completion Exception Tracker are all the jobs it reviewed, the Candidate Jobs.
There is an auto complete parameter setup, but I had already run the auto complete process, then ran the auto closing process… the auto closing was done after the complete and it still completed and closed 7 jobs that the completion process did not.
Let me see if I can re-run this process and get some exports to show what I’m seeing happen. This is very odd.
@FTI-SeniorAdmin Did you ever figure out why? I ran into that this month, for the first time that I know of.
I have change-logging on and I see that the jobs had been completed and closed earlier this year, then re-opened and un-completed. But then they were closed and completed by the auto-close process, in the same minute. We don’t run auto-complete at all.
Side thought, I have seen where an un-closed job will still retain its close date (rather than null it out). Curious if that factors in.
Hey @JasonMcD, @Rick_Bird , @FTI-SeniorAdmin , does job completion and job closing close a job that is within the parameters even if it is not completed?
For example, say we left the parameters pretty wide and manufacturing finished 70% of a job today (planning on clocking in the other 30% tomorrow).
If the job complete and job closing process ran that night and the parameters accepted anything under 40% variance, would the job be completed and closed?
-Utah
The second “completed” - you mean “didn’t make all of the parts”?
I have not tested that. Like I said, we don’t even run job auto-complete, so for the jobs to be auto-completing is pretty scary.
Yeah that is the case, if we “didn’t make all parts” would it just complete the job because it is within the thresholds?
Or does it look for any jobs where the final operation is completed?
Our thresholds are zero for everything. What is that, “no tolerance,” or “anything goes”?
I guess I should just uncheck “Job Completion” in this screen (for my scenario) and be done with it?
Beats me; I can’t find much on this. But we do usually complete the final op.
I’m not 100% certain, but when I tested this a few years ago (I need to work on documenting everything I do), I thought I saw it only process Job’s it considered ‘Canidate’ which means the Final Operation is marked complete, among other things.
I think this is how I tested it, perhaps you can too:
-Setup the Job scenario you are considering
-Opened Job Closing and did a search for type ‘candidate’ and copied the list to Excel
-Run Job Completion and then check the Job Completion Exception dashboard and the Log file from the completion process to work out what all was processed in the process and compare that to your candidate list.
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Thanks Rick, I was planning on testing it this week. The last place where it was running, it ran all 5 years that I was there, but I only ever dug into the parameter portion of it, not which jobs it marks as candidates.
-Utah
According to the Job Management Course -10.2.600 (pg 67):
Jobs available for completion display as Candidates in the Job Search/Job Filter when:
• The last operation is complete.
• A packer is created (non-stock part).
• The top level part is moved to inventory.
On the last point, it’s not very specific, also are these AND or OR conditions?
Here are some excerpts from various Epicor KB articles that may help to confuse the matter:
- KB0039054: It is set based on the value of JobOper.OpComplete of the last operation of the final assembly.
The selection loop in Jobcompletion/Closing is:
FOR EACH JobHead WHERE JobHead.Company = Cur-comp
AND JobHead.JobFirm = TRUE
AND JobHead.JobReleased = TRUE
AND JobHead.JobType = ‘MFG’:U
AND JobHead.JobClosed = FALSE
AND JobHead.Candidate = TRUE
EXCLUSIVE-LOCK:
- KB0046435:
“Candidates are those jobs for which each assembly’s final operation’s status has been flagged complete”
- KB0049644:
“Candidate = All jobs that have the last sequential operation on the top level assembly marked as complete (Does NOT consider the operation that is marked as Final Operation).”
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Rick thanks for digging into it. I am with you, are these and/or conditions. I would also wonder what happens when they only receive half to inventory, would it then be a candidate even if the final op isn’t complete.
I know that wouldn’t be best practice, but I can see it happening here potentially.
Thanks again for your help.
I’ll add my 2 cents to the discussion. From the Application User Guide:
A complete job has finished its production quantity and labor transactions, but material and other costs can still be placed against it. Completing a job removes any remaining shop load and material requirements.
A closed job is totally finished and has received all of its costs. The accounting department typically closes the job after auditing the financial transactions. This prevents the job from being used in any transactions or adjustments.
We complete/close several 100s of jobs each week and use this process so our supervisors can deal with job exceptions instead of manually review all production jobs.
We run this as a two step process. We have the Auto Completion schedule run first and then run the Auto Close process after completion is done as daily scheduled tasks.
Our thresholds are setup as shown below.
Our supervisors use the Job Closing Exception Tracker to review jobs that were not auto closed.
They can also use the Job Completion Exception Tracker to see jobs that didn’t complete. They usually just use the job closing exception tracker.
The exception trackers will show in the log details why a job didn’t auto close. From there they go to Job Closing and review job in more detail to determine if the cost or material exception is ok and will either update material or labor transactions as needed or manually close the job.
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Now that I think about it I never got a solid answer as to why I had jobs being auto completed and closed when only running the auto close process. After messing with this over and over again and then our CFO finding out how many jobs fell outside our threshold’s we shifted our efforts.
We now use a dashboard that shows all of the jobs that are complete with their shipping qty’s, the CFO exports that creates a closing list and then I run it with the DMT tool to close out the jobs.
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