We have a part number that has 2 suppliers. How is Epicor able to track the part quantities by supplier? I know in the stock status report it just shows by part number. I thought about setting up multiple bins to store them in but then it would be up to people to remember to receive to and make jobs from the right bins and I don’t like leaving things like this up to people remembering. Anyone else handle it this way or have a better way of doing it? Any ideas on this would be much appreciated
We prefix the lot number with the Supplier initials.
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I can see how that would work well. We currently don’t use lot tracking
… and if actually tracking individual receipts by discrete lot numbers isn’t necessary, you could just have lot “numbers” of “Supplier1” and “Supplier2”. Any receipt would just be put into the “lot” of the supplier that it came from.
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Either Lot numbers as previously suggested, or by BIN… but that is the only way to have the system keep track of the information. Epicor “mingles” the inventory once it is received, unless it is by lot, at which point, the system also assumes that you segregate the inventory physically in the warehouse by lot as well. If you use lot control, you can store all the lots in one BIN, as long as the parts are properly marked/packaged.
But my further question would be “Why does it matter?”… is the quality different between the suppliers? is there a difference in fit/form/function between the two? Normally once you get something into stock, it doesn’t matter UNLESS it is a critical part that requires lot tracing.
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This particular component goes into multiple assemblies and one supplier gets used for assembly A and B. The other supplier gets used for assembly C. I believe it has to do with “approved suppliers” according to the customer. I believe there’s a certain standard of quality with one of the suppliers. The parts are stored separately and marked with the supplier number. Can you set in the method the default bin to pull a particular component from? If that can be done then simply just having separate bins would be good enough as long as when making jobs we could set defaults.
Sounds like these should be three separate part numbers then… otherwise, MRP will not know the difference. If it sees you have enough of the assembly A part, it will not tell you to buy the assembly B style. The only way that it would know is if they are different in their part number.
Going back in the “way back machine” I used to work for a company that manufactured small electronic parts… we had a part that “LOOKED” the same, had the same specifications, BUT had different performance from supplier A vs supplier B. In some of our parts, we could use either one. In others, it was critical that we use the Supplier A version. We created two different dashed part numbers (-01 and -02) both with he same prefix. we put the correct one in the BOM for each assembly, and we never had problems.
If A can be substituted for B, but not vise-versa, you can put that into the Substitute part list on the part table.
OH… to answer you question, No, you cannot tell the system to only pick from the one BIN, unless you are using Project Level inventory, but that would require you to use project inventory for ALL parts, and would probably be overkill for your needs.
One further option would be to use the “advanced UOM” capability with the Part Attributes option. Part Attributes allow you to stock inventory by attribute, and MRP DOES honor the attribute requires… but again, this can be overkill for your actual need… it would be much simpler to create a new part number.
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After talking with the engineers and trying some scenarios out in test I think we are going to end up going the separate parts route with a prefix on the part number. That will be cleaner. If you could specify which bin to pull from on the job then we would probably go with the multiple bin route. Thanks everyone for all your input and knowledge.
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