I want to explore ways to automate Part Entry and am looking for suggestions/ideas.
Currently we assign a Part Number that corresponds to the item such as for 1/2" Clear Cast Acrylic, it would be ACR 0.500 C CLR, but am thinking about changing to a numeric system so Epicor could auto assign. Does anyone do this?
Does anyone use BPM to set fields in Part Entry?
Anything you are doing that works well?
Thank you for your help and I will be at Insights next week
No, but I wish I had thought of it and knew how to do it way back in Vantage days. 
You can use a BPM to set default values for any of the part properties like part class, etc. Create a post processing method directive on the Part.GetNewPart method and set whatever values you want.
You can also use BPMs to setup a process to auto assign part numbers. We have been using both methods for some time now. Link below on a post explaining how to do it. Use the “Method 6” from this post.
Couple things to watch out for:
In addition to what @bmanners says, our friend @timshuwy has also written a white paper available on EpicWeb:
Definitely worth the read.
The initial version of that paper was written TWELVE years go, and it has undergone three rewrites. I wrote it for the customer I was working with at the time, as they had some bad practices and needed some guidance. One of their evil deeds was putting spaces into part numbers, and every once in a while, someone would accidentally put two spaces in the middle, resulting in adding another part number.
I realize as I read this again, that it probably needs to be revised and republished once more since we now support Part ATTRIBUTES and Inventory by Revision / Inventory by Attribute. I will put that onto my future “to do” list.
Evil on the customer, but also poor design decision on the software side.
Gotta agree with this. I’ve even seen key fields that write trailing spaces. Which is awful since many users are doing data entry by pasting from Excel. That’s not even a “customer has bad processes” issue.
I am in the middle of implementing Kinetic and am using @timshuwy method to generate part numbers. I also am starting to build a custom slide out that will ask what the user is creating (hardware or non-hardware). Then they will be prompted with cascading drop downs to select what they are creating (Field 1: Bolt, Field 2: Heavy Hex, etc.). Then when they are done filling it out, the part number will be assigned and the description will be created. I should not have to do this, but this is the easiest way to fix a business issue that management will not fix themselves.
You know John, that sounds like a good Insights presentation.
I’ve already bombed at presenting a few years ago. I plan on leaving any presenting to people who are not me in the future. 
Ok, come laugh at mine. As expected, I did not rehearse.