We have a scenario which I hope someone can help me with. We manufacture pieces of equipment, which have ~1000 components that make them up. Each piece of equipment is a Make Direct Job that has been configured, and is linked to a sales order Line/Release. When we have a component not in stock that is not critical to the installation of the equipment, we will ask the customer if we can ship the unit to them without that component. The question is how to handle that situation in the Epicor system.
Currently we would adjust the item into inventory, issue the item to the unit to get costing correct on the Job, then create a no charge sales order to ship the component piece to the Customer whenever it comes into inventory. We also have a BPM in place that prevents the jobs from being shipped if there is any mismatch in the required quantity and the issued quantity, to hopefully keep costing issues from happening. That way we will see the demand.
Finance wants to remove the adjustment step, as they are tightening controls on access to quantity adjustments. So one thought was to add a checkbox on the shipment entry screen to allow the person doing the shipment to bypass the issued quantity check, and ship the job without those components being issued to the job. We want the components still to be part of the job, because we print service manuals that list all the component pieces for the job and what options they are part of, so the customer can order replacement parts. The purpose for the checkbox will be for reporting on what lines we shipped with missing components, and hopefully be able to trace the issues and reduce them over time.
The user would still enter a no-charge sales order for the backordered component to set a demand for the part, so when it comes in it can be shipped to the customer.
Can anyone think of a better solution, or if Epicor has a methodology in place for handling this situation?
My thoughts… Could you wait for the part to come in and issue it to the job to get the correct cost… Then just do a misc. shipment to the customer for the late part?
Misc. Shipments do not impact inventory… so there’s no reason to adjust anything in so you can both issue to the job and provide a customer shipment.
On the Misc. Shipment entry, you can even add the original SO number as a “Related To” link.
Being a Misc. Shipment, there would be no invoicing issue on the customer side. So, this would also eliminate the need to create a zero-dollar Sales Order.
The only caveat is how to remember to misc. ship that part to the customer when it arrives. I do understand the zero-dollar sales order was a means to keep a demand/reminder in the system to ship that part to the customer. So… if the Misc. Shipment cures the accounting/adjusting needs… you just need to figure out how to manage “remembering” where/to whom that part goes when it arrives.
If they are now leaving the Job open while waiting, a UD field could be added to JobMtl indicating that the customer is still owed this part perhaps. That would give you a way to track which parts are still owed to customers aside from just not being issued. Might help out with that shipping BPM too.
You can ship against a make direct job without it being completed. In this case, I think it’s even fine to complete the job from an operations standpoint. I wouldn’t complete it from a Job Close/Complete standpoint because you would want the material requirement to remain open.
I’d check out the financial transactions behind a process like that in test first. The last thing I would want is the debity/credity people coming after me. It might come down to costing methods too. Standard Cost hides a multitude of sins, for example. Essentially, what you have is a variance that eventually corrects itself.
