For various reasons, for some of our jobs we prefer to be giving each production station a full box worth of raw materials instead of the say half a box worth that they’ll actually need to complete the job. So for example we’ll have a box with 40# of material in it. The job may only call for 80# total but because we’re producing it at 3 stations we actually need 120# to be on-hand when we start the job. Is there a good way to get Epicor to help us plan to have all 120# be on-hand for the job but at the same time know that we’ll only actually consume 80# of it?
Epicor support suggested we look into salvage material which looked promising but as far as I can tell doesn’t automatically take into account being able to re-use the salvaged quantity at the end of the job in for example a time phase requirements report. Are there any other alternatives (or am I simply missing something?)
TLDR;
For a bit more context in case anyone’s wondering why we’re trying to do this. We’re a non-profit that packages meals. Part of our work is done at off-site locations where we bring all of the necessary materials and volunteers package the meals. Because we may be a thousand miles away from our warehouse we need to make sure we are sending out enough raw materials to cover any potential issues. Additionally, some of the ingredients come in a 40 or 50 pound box and while we know each table may only need 25# of that box we still want each to start out with a full box. All this means that while the event may only need quantity A of an ingredient we might need to send quantity 1.5A. This makes life hard for our buyer because while he might see demand for 500# the warehouse is actually putting 750# on the truck and suddenly we don’t have as much available for other jobs as though.
We could just inflate the per unit required amounts in the job’s materials but since we sometimes use backflushing that’d result in the extra materials actually being consumed rather than coming back unused ready for a different job. It also doesn’t take into account that at the end of the job we’ll get back leftovers and thus should take that amount into account when planning what to buy for next week.
Salvage material looked promising since we could put down that we need say 1.5# per unit finished product but then also say that there is 0.5# salvage per unit. That gets the demand to show up correctly but unfortunately, even though you’d think that since we just told Epicor we’d get back 0.5#/unit in salvage, the time phase doesn’t seem to be able to then make the next logical assumption that at the end of the job a bunch of salvage will be available for use in another job. Sure, once we actually tell Epicor officially how much was salvaged the inventory is correct but in the meantime we’ve just ordered extra materials and now we just got an extra 250# back from a completed job and now we’ve got way more than is needed.
