There are a couple of things that could help here, but none of them are going to make people obsolete, so employees will still need to be trained.
First thing is to maybe get rid of the ambiguous UOMs. I’m thinking of Roll, Spool, or anything that is not a hard conversion like Pair or Dozen. That way, instead of having to try and figure out what YOUR COMPANY needs, you make the supplier conform to you. And before anyone says that the supplier drives the UOM, tell the supplier that you are taking your business elsewhere and see how fast they change their tune.
Second thing that you can do is set all of your ambiguous conversions to Part Specific. Set the conversion to something weird, like 9. Then when they enter the 1 Spool and it comes out to 9 feet, that should clue them that they need to select the Override Conversion to change the Our Qty.
There are just too many exceptions in how a company stocks their inventory and how suppliers sell their goods to make this process idiot proof. At the very least, you should probably put together a document on what to watch out for as a Buyer. List out the common gotchas and hang it on each Buyers wall. You can at least say you did everything you could to help and leave it at that.
So, I searched this site last week to see what others said about the defaults, and there was nothing. It seems to have never come up before.
I just find that so hard to believe. I should summon @ckrusen to rant about UOM conversions…
But I mean, when there is this much working against me, it sounds like I am the idiot. But I think I have enough experience with this to know that this is a perpetual issue.
I guess it falls right in that sweet spot of problems - not huge and not minuscule:
Huge problems get dealt with
Minuscule mistakes can safely be ignored
Medium mistakes cause problems several months later but never get dealt with at the time of the mistake.
Especially if the mistake is to have too much of something. Accountants hate it, execs hate it, but the company kept the doors open, so it’s not a big deal.
Here is an interesting question that I do not know the answer to.
Can you even override the conversions in the grid? If not, is that the issue, Buyers who need to do conversions should only ever work in the Detail page?
I did this years ago with the default BOM qty. 777 is what I picked. The BOM gets flagged if it still says 777. So I’d also keep an eye on the PO thing via a BAQ. Neat idea.
I don’t think anyone’s discounting the trouble you’re having. Every company’s different. Your manufacturing (and indirectly your purchasing) could be far more complex than what others are doing.
UOMs are a pain in the rump if they aren’t accurate from day one…and @jkane had it right when he suggested that your suppliers should be flexible in adapting to your company’s UOMs. Let them convert it correctly - we’re the customers dadgum it!
Not to be confused with a “pair” of pants - that are typically a single indivisible item. Where as chaps are separable. And when someone says “assless chaps”, what do they mean? Aren’t all chaps assless?
And FTR - my issue with UOMs has always been with correcting them after they’ve been used. That and everyone else’s inability to use them properly.
ALL the settings are designed so that MRP can do all the mundane work. You can do all the manual work you want, but if you want the computer to do that you have create and maintain the settings, and then let it actually do it. Manually creating POs bypasses all those settings.
If that’s what they want, then don’t let them create manual purchase orders. See @jkane thread above.
I tested this out, and yes, you can do all of the same things in the grid that you can do on the line page. You just need to expose the columns for the other fields.
Manual POs should be exceptions…otherwise you’re not letting the system do the heavy lifting.
Nonstock/commodity items for the office.
An overbuy in advance of a price increase.
To cover an impending/unexpected demand spike (i.e. a new part to an existing customer, or an entirely new customer)…for which you don’t already have the quantity forecasted.
I’m not saying that a reinvention would necessarily be a BAD thing, but you certainly aren’t wrong. The issues you’re describing are more PROCESS related than anything else.
If you were just starting out, we could probably design a process that accounts for everything you’ve asked for. Epicor out of the box is designed to be generic; we’d tailor it to suit what you need.
Since you AREN’T just starting out, there is a culture of “this is how we do things here”. Changing that culture entails a lot of swimming against the tide.
You are asking valid questions. The answers aren’t really that complicated, but the execution will be, um, exhausting.
I can offer a little insight, but i can’t actually answer the question. I’m a dev at Epicor, I’ve worked with developer who made a lot of the changes to the purchasing workflow over the past few years and they are very focused on workflow, efficiency, not presenting you with a button you click yes 95% of the time, etc. We just had a little chat and they don’t know. You’re going to be relying on someone who was involved years ago or someone with a broad product knowledge to answer for the why
In general there is always the comfort to keep things working as they have done, and a change from a long running behavior that is a potential configuration change than an obvious bug will get the configuration added. I can only guess to the why, but the setting in company configuration everyone has referenced is because someone brought it up. It might just need someone to bring this up.
