Might anyone know where in Epicor I might need to look, in terms of out-of-the-box reports or system dashboard solutions, that might help to assess the any following manufacturing questions (as expressed by various departments in my company)…
“Are we ahead of production plan or behind production plan?”
“Do we over produce/purchase or under produce/purchase a part?”
“What is our current WIP?” – or – “What parts do we currently have in WIP and what is their total material cost?”
“What are our scheduling, cost, and material on-time variances?”
“What parts are behind delivery schedule?”
“What tools and personnel requirements and qualifications are
needed by OP?”
“What is our total inventory broken down by warehouse?”
“What does an operator or assembler have scheduled to work on
today?”
To be clear, I’m not looking to develop any customizations that might answer these questions. I’m more concerned with what Epicor might already have inherently that can be leveraged to gain insight into these areas.
For example, I know that the MES component is where I, as a production worker, can pull up a specific job and enter time against an operation on that job. However, what if I simply want a concise list of scheduled operations/tasks that I need to knock out for the day? Where might I go to see such a list?
Another example - is there an existing Epicor report that, when a specific part number is entered, the report will say, “Yep - you’ve got 3 of those currently in WIP, 12 of them are sitting in the main warehouse, 4 of them are in the Customer Service warehouse, 2 are in scrap awaiting inspection, and 10 are on order from Vendor X”?
A lot of what my company has demonstrated interest in, is fairly specific and won’t exactly appear in the Epicor Help:
I just need a little guidance because I don’t know every possible corner of the Epicor system.
there are a bunch of sources for the data, but maybe not all in one place.
part tracker can tell you some of this
Priority Dispatch report will show you where parts currently are in WIP
Planning Workbench will show any jobs that need to be rescheduled in-out because they are not meeting due dates.
Work In Process report shows some of what you are asking.
Time Phase (display and report) shows some of this.
You probably will need to create a few Dashboards to get exactly the data you are looking for. But I dont consider dashboards “Customizations” as much as they are necessary “Tailoring” of the software to meet your business culture.
somewhat agree… but with the disclaimer that our reports are trying to meet the needs of every possible environment and show how you can get so much data…
I view many of the standard reports and dashboards as what CAN be extracted.
For example, inventory reports must work for Lot/Serial control, multiple Sites, Warehouses, Bins, Part numbers. They also hide /show summaries, parts with zero on hand, non-nettable, and costing based on many different possible costing techniques etc, etc… if you try to put everything “required” into one line of data, you simply run out of room…
BUT, you can write your own dashboard (or report) and only display the fields YOU need, and get better (and may times faster) results.
As i have said for 25+ years… ERP systems are great collectors of data. They have lots of it… more than we can display. Making a new dashboard that shows what your culture needs is why we give you some great tools within Epicor.
Noted. That’s essentially the standpoint we have in our Epicor environment. Our default is to use what Epicor provides. If something falls outside of that, but still must be tracked within the central ERP framework - or - if the reporting does not fit the manner in which we might want to view it, then we’ll definitely roll with a customization.
These particular questions, for us, need to be answered so that we can realign our personnel with the foundational “Epicor way” of data entry and reporting. We’re trying to reign in a lot of ERP processes that are, unfortunately, being conducted from outside of Epicor… and improve upon ERP processes where we’re sabotaging elements of Epicor for purposes that weren’t intended by Epicor.
If we can’t answer a simple question, like, “What is our current WIP?”, and start from Epicor’s foundational data I/O principles - then we’re in a worrisome position. That’s basically why I figured I ask for the out-of-the-box solutions first.
What we’re really trying to determine is – can Epicor answer these questions for us already, and if not, what might be required in a customization of some sort to answer those questions? My current focus is on the former element.
You guys have been great - and thanks for providing some direction so I can do some thorough study on it.
In my opinion, that’s not such a simple question. If you want to know the costs in WIP, then run the GL report. If you want P/N’s, Qty’s and costs of materials issued to WIP, that is much trickier. Especially since at its core, Epicor only considers WIP to consist of costs.
We definitely want that good sight-line from both angles. The part cost tied to WIP is something our Finance department staff will want a bit of insight on - and our Supply Chain/Executive team might want to look more at the part quantity level in order to work together on Production Scheduling efficiency plan (with an overall effort to reduce dollars wrapped up in WIP).
So, yeah, the gambit can run from the simple to the convoluted.
One way to look at the question “do we need a customization” is to also ask yourself “What are the 1000’s of other companies using Epicor doing?”. <<<warning… sales pitch>>>
This is actually a good argument for going to Epicor Insights 2020 because there are litterally 1000s of other users all doing the same thing, and asking each other questions. Just like this forum, except face-to-face. On top of that, you have access to Product Managers, programmers, and a few Sr Level consultants (like myself) to ask even deeper questions.
Just getting our own organization to agree to what WIP consists of, was daunting.
In my opinion, WIP consists of just the costs of the materials issued to manufacturing, which have not yet been accounted for in shipments, receipts to inventory or scrap. To know what parts make that up is much easier said than done.
totally agree…
In MY world… WIP = total value of “Work In Process”… which can be re-defined as "Partially complete inventory. WIP is neither a finished product, nor the inventory it is being made from. If you take a piece of pipe and cut it into 1 foot pieces, it is no longer a pipe, but it is not yet it is not yet a towel rod either. it is “In Process”… it has material cost, it has labor cost. If you stopped work now, it is scrap. BUT if you proceed, and apply more labor and more material, it becomes a finished product.
Epicor defines WIP as the total value of what has been issued / charged to a job, LESS the value that has been finished or scrapped. It is a fairly simple number, and can be seen in the Job tracker, and the production detail report (which has LOTS {did i say LOTS}) of detail. The same data can be derived with a simple BAQ that examines the Job Assembly table to see total costs charged to that assembly.
Thanks, Tim. I’ll take a look at both the Job Tracker module and the [Erp.JobAsmbl] table to see how I might be able to answer a few of the questions our departments have been asking. Thanks for providing more *insight (pun possibly intended) for me.
No doubt. I was able to attend in 2018, but our budget has not been as kind during the past 2 years for that event. I hope I’ll be able to return next year - absolutely loved the expert sessions and the Customer Presentations with “real world” application examples. There was one that I believe @knash presented that was a solution for his company’s sales team (I’m likely incorrect about that) where he bolted approximately 60 BPM nodes together on a pretty slick use of automation and UI feedback. You definitely learn a lot through the wisdom of others at Insights.
My two cents here, take a bit of a wirl through the demo database there are some gems in there from time to time. Earlier versions had demos of Verticals which had some nice ideas.
The other thing also do take a look at some of the system dashboard/baqs that you might able to lever off. They may not appear in the menus.
