Closed Jobs in Time Phase without material Issued Complete

Kinetic ERP
1

As a consultant, lately we’ve had customers that run into an issue with Closed Jobs showing in Time Phase Inquiry and report. Upon opening a case with Epicor, I was told that this is a functional change and it’s not a bug. This is what I was told by support. I don’t know when this was changed as it only recently came to our attention.

In the past, when a job is complete or closed, all load gets relieved from resources and also material requirements. That no longer seems to be the case. Now, if a job is closed and the materials, regardless of status, are not marked as issued complete, they still show as open requirements. This is impacting not only Time Phase, but PO suggestions and MRP.

This came to our attention when a customer mentioned in passing that they find Time Phase worthless because of this. The open material requirements for closed jobs are still factoring into the balance. For this one customer, this impacts all jobs back to the their beginning implementation in 2022.

Epicor has supplied us with a fix that will clear the closed job details from the PartDtl table to clear up the old, but we needed a new process moving forward or it will continue to happen.

The only way to mark incomplete issues to Issued complete is through Job Entry, Material list view. On Materials card, the Issued Complete field is hidden by default so you have to first unhide it. Jobs then need to be Unreleased and UnEngineered if the customer is using the Prevent Changes option in Company Configuration. There are a thousand reasons that can be cited for all materials not being marked as issued complete upon job complete or job closing.

There is no way to check that box in Job Closing, no way to check it on material issue (without a quantity after the fact), no way to check it on Job Adjustment. Even trying the DMT errored for this customer because the UOMcode on the material was not included in the default UOMClass.

Is anyone else experiencing this issue or think this is a good idea? Not all customers are great or perfect with transactions and certainly even UOM conversions can have an impact.

Anxious for your thoughts.

Thanks!

2

We also had this problem when working with a consultant one time. Our problem was we were closing the jobs via DMT and a completion date was not being populated to the JobHead table. My logic was even though the job was closed Epicor wasn’t viewing the job as complete and still being viewed in time phase, yet this was never confirmed with Epicor. I would check and see if the jobs are being closed via DMT.

3

In this case, it was a combo. In the past most jobs were just being closed manually, however, in recent months I just closed many jobs with the DMT with both a complete and closed date. I just went back to my spreadsheet to check. It is something to look into though. I’m going to do a compare of jobs I closed/completed with DMT vs. jobs that were closed manually to see if there is a difference on what happens after the DMT closes them. Thanks for the comment.

Edit: I checked some jobs to determine method of closing based on saved DMT imports. It doesn’t matter if the jobs were closed manually or through DMT. They all have complete and close dates.

4

I just did this test in 2024.1 and did not find the behavior you are reporting. I took a firm job with an open material requirement, verified the material requirement showed in time phase. I issued half of the required material and did not mark issued complete. Then I completed and closed the job. The remaining material requirement fell out of time phase at that point as expected. I would be curious if you have done a very specific test like this and if you get a different result, vs. just trying to chase down old jobs that display the problem.

I HAVE experienced the problem where old job material requirements show up in time phase. At the time Epicor support told us to stop using DMT to close jobs because not all the required business objects were getting appropriately triggered. After switching to only closing them manually/with an updateable dashboard the problem stopped. I know you said you are getting the problem on jobs closed manually too, but that is why I a curious what a new test shows.

5

I have to do more testing today based on your comments. all the jobs I was looking at were showing on time phase were closed before the recent 2024.1 upgrade to pilot so the jobs were closed prior to the last pilot refresh. They are SaaS multi-company. I’ll also do some comparisons to see if jobs closed with DMT react differently to jobs closed manually. I’ll get you an update later today.

6

Hi Carla. If you don’t mind, would you please share the name of, or ID for, the fix program?

7

Can you believe it has taken them all this time to find a fix that actually works? We went through 7 fixes! We’ve only tested in pilot so far and will be running it in live this weekend.
CR32546MPS_2024_1_8_SQL.zip

8

I did do a batch with DMT that I’m no longer using, but now I have a customer that is live not even a month. They are closing jobs manually and they are showing up on Time Phase report and inquiry. Epicor says they can’t reproduce it, yet I keep supplying them with documentation that proves it happens for multiple customers. I don’t know why sometimes it does or doesn’t.