We often receive lot tracked material from suppliers where it comes in multiple large containers. We want to keep track of where each container is put away in the warehouse. Ideally identifying them as they are received.
First thought was to use one of the lot detail fields (heat, firmware, etc.) but you only get to set those once per lot, not each time you receive goods. Concatenating onto the supplier’s lot number doesn’t work because of traceability reporting to our customers on our manufactured parts (i.e. what went into our products).
I think I didn’t describe things quite right; shouldn’t have used the word “container”. We are not trying to move/track multiple lots in a container, which is what I understand PCID does.
Our situation is a single lot of material arrives in multiple boxes. The boxes are numbered (for example, Lot A123 Box 1, Lot A123 Box 2, etc) - all the same lot number. Because of the size of the boxes we need to place them in different bins. We want to be able to identify where a particular box (ex. Lot A123 Box 2) is located.
I think the system does what you need by default - as long as your Lot# includes the Box# (in your example).
Lots are stored in Bins, and easily viewed in inventory that way. Lots are not required to be in a single bin by default. The PartLot, LotBin and other tables keep up with part totals and bin totals as you transact inventory (You supply a Part#, Lot, Warehouse, and Bin for each inventory transaction)
@MikeGross - we can’t concatenate the box number to the lot number. The traceability of our manufactured parts sold to customers requires the lot number matches the lot number on the raw material suppliers manufacturer’s certification (i.e. must be “Lot A123” not “Lot A123 Box 1”) and we only get one manufacturer’s cert for the Lot A123 shipment from the supplier (of multiple boxes).
So there is nothing inherent to do this with Lot tracking. However, I might argue that querying inventory would provide all of the Bins that contain a given Lot. You could locate the entirety of the Lot, just not by Box#.
If you must be able to locate a single box, then I believe you will need to utilize a customization in Inventory transactions that adds a mandatory field to the transaction data. Personally, I would add a custom field to the PartBin table called c_BoxNum and add it as a field to the Inventory transaction screen. You could do more in code to auto-increment that field automatically using any number of methods. If you use a handheld for inventory, this might be difficult. And if you move things around, in addition to put-away and issue transactions, then you’ll have to deal with all the field maintenance that goes with.
Note: I misspoke earlier - there is no LotBin table, PartBin contains LotNum.
Hmm… this gives good food for thought. I originally thought to record the box numbers at Receiving. Maybe it would be better at put-away. It gets even more interesting as in addition to using handhelds for material movement we also have receiving inspection on these materials.
This is all to try to automate the current manual “method” of running around the warehouse looking for a particular box when we report a material defect to the supplier and they ask us for which box it came in… Will definitely need to evaluate whether the effort to automate is worth it. May not happen often enough to justify the development effort.
you could still use PCID to do this, but it would be overkill… you could take each lot and put it into a PCID Box, then move the box around. you can search for the part/lot and find which PCID it is in and where you put that PCID. One Part/One Lot/One PCID… overkill…
but as someone above said, you can still simply move each box to different bins and “forget” about which box number it is… it doesn’t sound like the box number is the issue… you simply need to put things away in different places, which Epicor can support.
Hi Tim - I guess I just don’t understand. We receive one shipment, Lot A123, which consists of 15 boxes all the same lot number - marked Box 1, Box 2, Box 3… Box 15. We put them away in different bins around the warehouse. Two weeks later I need to find Box 8.
I know I can put Lot A123 away in different bins by moving the quantity of 1 to each bin. I just cannot figure out how to know specifically which box is in each bin. Maybe I need more caffeine…
I work for a pharmaceutical manufacturer and we have to identify license plates for each container. Our original design was implemented before PCID existed. We assign a license plate to each container using the lotnum field then we group together the license plates in a UD table that becomes our lot number. In your example, we would store A123 in a key field in a UD table then assign box1 in the lotnum field (we use lot generation at PO receipt for this). We store the grouped lot number in a UD field in PartLot to create the collection of license plates. With the license plate stored in lotnum, you could track everything to the detail of box 1. The tricky part is to add the code to store attributes at the lot level above the license plate level.
We receive steel coils in pallets sometimes multiple per pallet and each is identified as a singe Lot#. There is a UD field for the vendor identifier that can be the same among many Epicor lots.
Vendor Identifier might by X1234567 with 3 units on the pallet.
And we Have:
R100-1
R100-2
R100-3
If we needed to move each of them to different bins we could.