Planning contract bins, how to move from bins? (the right way?)

I’m going to kick a dead horse a little bit here. We use planning contract bins here to be able to order materials to jobs before the job is built. It’s something that we need to do since we are engineer to order. We could order to inventory, but it’s hard to know what’s allocated to what, and what’s been ordered. Ordering to a planning contract is a nice way to keep things sorted out.

That being said, with stuff being ordered early, sometimes they are estimates, or something changes in the engineering of the job. So we may have parts left over, or moved from one job to the next. So we may need to move things from one planning contract bin to another, or into or out of regular inventory. Plus if I do have some on hand that I want to use up, the material can either be backflushed from a contract bin, or an inventory bin, but not both. I would assume you would just move some of your inventory into the contract bin to account for this.

The only way that I know how to do that is to use the inventory transfer screen, and for some reason, Epicor shows the on hand quantity for a contract bin on this screen as a 0. I called service about it, and they told me that it was working as intended, and this screen is not supposed to be used for moving parts in and out of contract bins. They couldn’t tell me how I was supposed to do it, other than the purchasing to contract should just be exactly correct and not need to move things in and out of these bins. FWIW, it does move the inventory fine, it’s just annoying to have to use another screen, or the values in the search window to cross reference the quantities.

Does anyone else have an idea of how this is supposed to work? Or a simple way to fix this? The bin quantity in the view is set to 0. Can I do a BPM to populate that?

So I ended up making a post-processing BAQ on ChangeFromBin, and ChangeToBin to update the table by query. Now it shows quantities whether it’s a contract bin or not.

I still don’t think I should have to do that…

1 Like

You have to get into the headspace of the Epicor developer… On the Inventory Transfer screen there is nowhere to specify the Planning Contract ID. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense that you should be able to move qty in or out of the related Planning Contract Bin.

As you rightly identify though, it’s not always possible to purchase 100% based on forecasts - so the need to move stock in and out does occur.

Annoying isn’t it? Isn’t supposed to be their job to get into the head of a manufacturer?

For planning contracts, the bin is tied to the planning contract. Anything in that bin is by definition applied to that planning contract. You can’t have a bin tied to more than one, So it would be redundant to have a place to specify the planning contract bin, and search for a bin. It’s a one to one relationship. It would make sense for them to display the applicable contract bin if it applies, but they aren’t doing that either.