Provide ability for disassembly

There are several business cases where it becomes necessary to break an assembly back down into component parts. One of these is a Customer Return through the RMA process. Another reason is when a company needs to complete an existing customer order and the quickest way to serve the customer is to break down an item in inventory to procure a stock-out component. And yet another reason might be an Engineering change that renders an assembly obsolete but the company might want to salvage some parts instead of disposing the entire assembly.

One potential way to accomplish such a goal would be a disassembly job. In the disassembly job, the assembly is “issued” to a job. This moves the cost of the assembly into WIP. The job would then need to be “engineered” to determine the parts that are salvageable. The component list could come from a Part Rev, an existing job, or a quote. The user would have the opportunity to select which parts are available for restocking. Operations might be added to the job to track the cost of disassembly and to schedule resources for doing so. When physical disassembly is complete, the operator would report the number of each component salvaged and then provide an inventory location to move each part to or maybe to send to Inspection Processing where, after checked, would go through the normal disposition process. When the job is closed, the residual value of non-salvaged parts and the labor reported would become the cost of disassembly.

Another option might be a reverse Kan Ban (Nab Nak?) that would start with reporting the components salvaged and then consume assemblies.

This has been on the wish list for many, many years and would be a welcome addition to the Epicor ERP solution.

Hi Mark,

I’m confused. I thought the system did this already, not sure what’s missing.
We do disassembly jobs with returned parts disposed to “Disassemble” ( a “placeholder” part) and salvage the parts to stock. What am i missing?

Thanks,
Nancy

How are you consuming the assembly? An RMA from a Customer? A part in inventory?

Hi Mark,

Yes, an RMA is used. The part being returned is disposed to job via RMA disposition (mtl 10 in screenshot). This places the cost of that returned part on the job. Salvage to stock transactions off the job take the parts with associated inventory value from the value of the disposed part. We have noticed that if costs are accidentally zeroed on disposition then cannot take parts with cost off via salvage to stock.

Nancy

1 Like

Does this require a certain license?

Can I take an assembly from Stock, issue it to a disassembly job like an RMA dispostion?

Where does the list of salvaged parts come from? Just entered by hand or can you select from a Rev, Job, Quote?

Hi Mark,

We don’t have any special license, just typical install.
I think you could take the assembly from stock, issue it and then do the Job receipt to salvage. The only difference I foresee is that I think you need to put the assembly on the job in the bom to do a normal issue of it from stock. For RMA disposition, you don’t need to setup bom on the job first, seem to be able to dispose at will.
On some of our nastier ones, we used a paste insert in the grid. I’ll try and find the format for doing that and post back.
Nancy

1 Like

Hi Mark,

I couldn’t find old upload, but played around with it and see that it works. It doesn’t look like it’s going to work, but it does, at least in 10.1.600.20 :slight_smile:

Here are the details. The job is making a part called Disassemble, the R42-31… part is the one being disassembled, it is mtl 10 on the job. The “H” column Part data is the list of parts being pulled off and their Quantity and UOM are in J,K,L,M. I tried making it simpler, pasting less but it kept failing. So, I figured WTH just paste it all. Having to put Bin in is a bit of a hassle, you might need to get the primary bins to do a good job on that. It fails without bin.



Note, you cannot pull more cost off the Issued part for disassembly than it’s worth. There is another tab in Job receipt to salvage for Costs… perhaps something could be done there if necessary…

Nancy

1 Like

I just had an issue with this, the part master had a phantom BOM so the RMA pulled in the part with no value even though the original job had materials added. I used the “Override Costs” checkbox on the RMA disposition to add value to the part. I am wondering if that is the correct approach ?

1 Like

Hi Evan,

I’m not sure why a phantom bom part number would not have any cost on it in the system. I just checked some of ours and they have cost. When I did RMA for it though it came in at zero and I checked Use Current Costs and it filled out the data. If that didn’t work, i think that Override Costs and type your own in should work ok. This is when I usually go to accounting and ask them to look at whether what we’ve done has caused any unexpected accounting difficulties :smile:

1 Like

It depends on what your costing method is. If you are using average costing, you probably won’t have any inventory transactions against the phantom part, so there won’t be any (average) cost.

2 Likes

Ah that’s it. We use standard cost.
Thanks Brandon!

2 Likes

OK, sounds like I did the right thing then. Thanks for responding. Quite convenient that this feature request thread appeared the first time I needed to disassemble a returned part. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like

I am trying this on 10.2.300.6 -
Just am not having any luck

Hate it when Epicor “Fixes” something that wasn’t broke. :slight_smile:

Anyone else have any luck with later versions?