Looking for some advice on how others routinely close jobs. First, what is the difference between “completing” vs. “closing” a job? Is there any financial implication? We have never gotten real clarity on this since our Epicor implementation back in February of this year.
Second, what is your process to “close” jobs? Currently, our expediting team reviews every single job, confirms that all operations are properly completed, and they check the job “complete” in the Job Completion/Closing screen. This usually happens before the item ships out. Can we have these jobs automatically close after they are complete and ship or should I run a DMT monthly to close them?
At this point I have thousands of jobs that have been “completed” but not “closed” that I need to deal with prior to yearend.
Completing it removes the job from the shop load and has no financial implications.
Closing the job is when the financial stuff happens with variances and whatnot.
You can use the Auto Job Complete/Close process to set some tolerances on cost/qty and have them close or complete on a schedule you define.
What parameters need to be set up so that, if the below criteria is met, then the job will CLOSE?
-Job is Complete
-Stock Qty +Order Qty = Prod Qty
-Recv’d to stock + Recv’d to Job + Shipped Qty = Complete qty
If the above criteria are met, then a job should be closed. We do not do full routings at this time, so I do not want to base the automated closing process on cost.
Example below - this job has been reviewed by our expediters and completed and has also shipped. This job can be automatically closed.
If you want something more like that, you could create a BAQ to get the candidates and then DMT to close them.
Or, if you’re feeling really fancy, make it an Updateable BAQ that closes them on the GetList Post and schedule that BAQ, but that’s going to require some code.
Can you share how your company has the parameters set up? If I set it up per below, does that mean that, if the quantities match exactly, the job will automatically close? I tested this in Pilot and it appears that it closed 4,200 out of 4,700 jobs. The rest of the jobs are showing in the Job Closing Exception Tracker for various reasons. I just want to make sure this is the proper way to set this up.
In other words, it will close and complete a job if the material is within 10% +/- of being fulfilled, operational quantity within 25% +/- of being fulfilled, and subcontract is within 10% under, but not over.
@lfilzen I would use a bpm to set estimated to actual when actual is updated.
There are some things that will not complete or close depending on your material costs. We have items that costs fractions of a penny, but if they are over issues that add up to less than a dollar, but are over the max percentage of 999% the job has to be manually closed.
You can do a lot of jobs with paste insert in the job closing screen, so 500 should not take too long.
Wanted to reach out and see if you have spoken with your IT department on their Job Closing Automation. I appreciate your help greatly. Please feel free to contact me through my email if needed jpielage2@dupps.com
Is it okay to create a basic Job Closing updateable dashboard to allow users to simply tick JobComplete and JobClosing after review or should this only be done through the JobClosing screen?
It’s not as simple as it seems. I tried doing this a while ago. The dashboard closed the jobs just fine but it skipped the part where it relieved the WIP quantity and it took us a while to realize it and now I have like 3 months of jobs that are closed/complete but still have quantity in WIP.
I have done exactly what you are describing inside a BPM in the past with no problems. you just need to validate that in YOUR database that your costs are released and any remaining WIP costs are gone. this typically happens with the closed/complete flags going from false to true.
