Locations for Make-to-order completed job

We have a lot of small make-to-order jobs that all end up as very similar small boxes of goods. When they’re done, they’re put in a dedicated rack of small bins to be picked for shipping.

Unless we’re missing something, it seems unreasonably difficult to put that bin location against the completed job in Epicor so that the person who comes to pick it for shipping knows which bin to look in. Completed parts on a make-to-order job don’t seem to have any kind of location registered.

Any suggestions?

By definition, “make-to-order” never gets received to stock, so it can’t reference a bin location. I’ve run into this problem twice, and the two solutions were completely opposite BUT worked for the environment.

The first place also had to gather up paperwork (inspection reports, certificates, etc) which tended to take a chunk of time, so Finance there recommended that the parts actually be received to stock and then shipped from stock… which necessitated a major change in the order and job creation processes.

The second place just took a photocopy of the first page of the job traveler and taped it to the box. Since the job number was the same as the order number, the pickers had all the information the needed.

Interesting.

We have been operating the second system for some while, but it’s got to the point where there are so many that the pickers need to know where to look for the particular box - it’s always been identifiable once they do find it.

And the first way isn’t an option, because we leverage the fact that make-to-order products are treated differently so that we can avoid adding thousands of almost-identical parts to the part record. Each make-to-order job will be slightly different from the others even though it has the same PartNum, and if we receive them to stock that becomes a problem.

Our implementation consultants created a sequence of BPMs that appears to move WIP to a different location, and it’s only now I come to look at it a few years later that I realise it doesn’t actually really do that because make-to-order jobs don’t seem to have any WIP record except for the materials so there’s nothing to move.

I’m inclined to add a custom location field to one of the Job tables and deal with it that way. It just seems very odd that there isn’t any clear way of dealing with the situation out of the box.

i suggest the same, create a BPM to pop up a BPM form to capture this Bin details and store it on a created UD filed on relevant Job table ( i suggest the Job Header ) at the relevant transaction (may be completed qty > 0) , and another one to clear its value once the full job qty been shipped, then you can create updatable BAQ/Dashboard to show the list of these jobs only if this UD field is not blank.

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