So, it’s been a while and I figured I would update you all on how planning contracts are going for us and what we (I) think of planning contracts.
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It’s not as automatic as I would like it to be. It does a little bit better job of keeping things organized for pre-ordered stuff, but you pretty much have to the same steps in a slightly different format, just slightly less time dependant. I was expecting that a job on a planning contract would follow a hierarchy for parts to be issued (backflushed in our case) where the whole job would be on the contract and the backflush hierarchy would look at the contract bin to backflush from first, and then move on down the normal hierarchy that exists for backflushing. It doesn’t do that. You have to set each material that needs to come from the planning contract in the job to pull from the planning contract. If you have the job linked to planning contract, when you get details it will link anything that’s non-stock and set link to contract in the part master to the planning contract when the material is being added to the job. Then when it’s backflushed, it will only backflush from the contract bin, whether there is anything in there or not, so you would have to transfer in inventory to get rid of the negative.
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Bin locations are replaced by contract bin. This is a bit of a pain. To work around this, we unhid the bin description field in the part tracker and added it to the reciept labels. We have the receiving/kitting modify the description to show the physical bin locations of where that contract material is being stored once it starts coming in. Since the idea (in our business) is to keep job materials together when they come in to reduce the amount of work putting away and re-picking things, this will probably work ok since there shouldn’t be that many bin locations (probably a max of 4). So a short list of locations to look in is better than having no idea where the physical location is at all.
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PO suggestions. These are a bit buggy when you add in planning contracts. I haven’t had time to really sit down and trail and error everything out, but we seem to get a couple of weird things here and there. I think it might have to do with trying to combine contracts onto one PO, but I’m still not sure. We want to have each job have it’s own planning contract (we have large custom jobs) which helps for kitting and keeping things separated, but it’s not really feasible to have purchasing separate everything onto separate PO’s for different jobs. The help says not to combine different planning contracts to the same PO, but the system let’s you do it, and it seems to work. We’ll see after some more time. One of the benefits of the ways contracts are working, is the items that would be purchase direct, and would have their own line for each material sequence, now gets group together as one suggestion, so that help out. It’s basically ordering to inventory, but being able to keep the materials separated out by job.
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Order in inventory. The fact that we are now ordering to inventory, instead of direct to the job, really helps out in the costing aspect. Since ordering direct to the job keeps the costs separate from the averages and whatnot, the cost for things that we didn’t have in inventory were never in the system. This was a problem for any estimating. Now the costs make it into averages and last so that costing is accurate. (it would be nice if epicor had a configuration setting to control whether purchase direct costs were calculated in the part master cost or not)
So that’s what I’ve been seeing so far. We have a lot of materials ordered through planning contract so far, not so much here and issued yet, so we’ll see how that goes as we get more into it.