heading down our deep dark road of making flow between sites as efficient as possible, we’re still fighting our way through configured items, my apologies if I’m doing a poor job of explaining how we’re attempting to operate.
we were previously hoping we could configure parts on our retail sites and then allow them to be transferred from manufacture site to retail site, however we’re struggling to get Epicor to figure out how to allow these to be transferred (can only transfer stock items), if we go the PO Route we’re not sure you can run the configurator (does the enterprise version help with this) against the site manufacturing the part so it looks at their capabilities to create the part, then allow the part to be transferred to the retail site?
For those who’ve spent a bit more time in the configurators and preferably the CPQ, is there an easy/nice way to export and import created parts… if we are doing things via PO’s then if we can automagically generate those and push config parts around it might again allow a Hands off site to site capability?
We don’t have multiple sites, but we are multi-company and therefore the PO->SO->Job->Shipment-Receipt process works pretty good for us - although we’ve been toying with building a lot of our customer stuff to inventory because our customers often order a large qty but want it broken down in smaller qty’s over multiple shipments. Not knowing that up front causes a lot of paperwork headaches later…
I was thinking it might be an avenue you should explore. Make the CFG’d stuff to inventory then maybe write a BPM that recognized the part # (or that it is a CFG part) and automatically creates the inventory transfer transaction.
Hmm, I agree that even inter-site the PO/SO might be easier to automate, how would you go about creating the configuration part between sites, we’d need something to pull through the BOO/BOM/MOM from company to company… or is that what the enterprise CPQ handles?
Your response confused me - maybe I’m reading it wrong. Are you interchanging “sites” and “companies”? you may need to draw us a map
CPQ = A third party product that is cloud based and can integrate back to ERP. It is not the same thing as the Configurator(CFG) built into ERP.
The Enterprise Configurator takes care of configuring in one company and manufacturing in another, and it does so in conjunction with intercompany trading (POs and SOs). We use it extensively between our sales and manufacturing companies (we don’t do intercompany, but for other reasons).
Simply between sites in a single company is not a problem since the parts and the CFG exists at the company level, not the site level.
Thanks for your replies and sorry for the confusion!
we run a mix of site/company types, basically manufacturing hubs who create parts start to finish that have retail sections built in and then remote sites who take pre-finished goods and might either sell those or make fairly minor adjustments to those products and sell to the customer
I was under the impression that CPQ was fully built in just like CFG, good to know there is a difference, the nail we’d like to hit on the head is both inter-plant/site and inter-company configured items
how hands off is your process for generating the SO/PO and so fourth? does the enterprise configurator need anything special or due to creating parts it allows you to transfer that configured item?
CPQ looks super cool but has a number of shortcomings (for us) as well as requiring a good bit of work to get the interface to work for more than one company. We talked to them a lot at Insights and I’m thinking it’s just too much work to get it working until they build a few more things into it.
Our process is pretty manual because of how custom our stuff really is. We are almost 100% Make-to-order. We have a central customer service group that does the SO/Job entry from scratch using the CFG once they receive a PO from one of the “sales” companies.
As for getting it all set up, it’s a LOT. The short version is something like this: The MFG company controls the Part Master record, and you create the part/revision there. The you mark it as ‘global’ and go to the sales company to get the part created by linking it to the global part. Both steps are manual, but you can use DMT for a lot of it. Then you attach a CFG to the Part Revision in the manufacturing company. You have to run the Enterprise Synch and Enterprise Configurator tasks in the background to keep it all in synch… and then there are considerations if you’re creating ‘parts on the fly’ or new Part numbers for each config, and on and on.
You sound like you have basic manufacturing to inventory, and then re-manufacturing at other companies. Site and Company have to be explicitly separate when you talk about this stuff - and that distinction controls the HOW of it all.
mmm, thankyou for the reply, that gives us a lot to think about! we’d be around 10% configured items and the guys at our Retails Sites (which can be separate companies depending on if their usual MFG site is overloaded) are expected to be able to run through a configuration themselves rather than relying on the MFG site to build the spec for them (the MGMT view is how can the retail site sell to the customer if they don’t know how a product is made) we make extensive use of global parts (we have a whole separate company setup for this) and DMT Global Part link is a life saver.
I guess if the enterprise config allows parts to be PO/SO between plants then we just need to see if we can break it and focus on automating the SO/PO Process to see if we can get it seamless
