Thought I’d fill people in on what I’ve learned about this in the past year. I successfully converted most of our production to part master parts, and most of our jobs to “concurrent” production mode. Epicor automatically creates a co-part with the same PartNum as the job, and sets ProdQty to the quantity of that co-part, which is exactly what we want.
We still have a few jobs with non-part master parts. We tried putting those parts on concurrent jobs, and accounting screamed because Epicor calculates a massive job costing variance. So we still use “sequential” for jobs that contain non-part master parts. Epicor wants to set ProdQty to the sum of the quantities on all JobProd lines, so we’re still brute forcing it to the quantity of the job part. I’m looking for a better solution again, so I’ll post what I discover.
This is really interesting. I read this thread some time ago and I’m really interested in your further investigations. You may think this is unique to printing, but we have a small herd of Amada turret punch machines and we’ve never properly worked them into Epicor.
The principles are similar. We have part A that usually is punched out 70 to a sheet, let’s say. And part B that goes 3 to a sheet. A sheet in this case being a 4’ by 8’ of 0.063 aluminum instead of paper.
Nesting software exists that can optimize our sheet yield. Basically says, for such-and-such group of parts and quantities, here are 100 sheets, each completely different, producing all these different parts nested to make the best of your sheet stock. The best ones can actually take your existing inventory of offcuts and partial sheets as an input.
I’d love to have Epicor spit out a single job for a new sheet “part” that doesn’t currently exist, that would be the flock of mixed and matched parts we need today from a sheet. I kind of suspect that I could code a C# BPM to do this somehow, but am just waiting for a Long Winter Evening By The Fire to do it.
Please do keep us posted on anything more you learn!
You can have 1 one to many relationship, for example one main part creates 3 co-parts of same part number. You will need to set the Job Mode to Concurrent to enable this (Job Mode by default is sequential)