Hello All,
On our part revisions we have drawing numbers and other comments. When we make a new revision and unapprove the old revision, how do you change all open demand for the old revision to be replaced with the new revision? Do you even do this?
Is this possible without having to go into all of the open orders, quotes, jobs, and purchase orders where the old revision exists?
What is best practice?
Any thoughts or comments are appreciated.
Revision change is affecting a lot.
Sales orders as soon as the part is added with rev A, changing the part revision B as the active one to does not change it on the sales order. The part needs to have the revision replaced. (all they do most of the time is remove the part and add it again… as it makes sure any other info transfered gets the latest version…
At minimum, we did a BPM to send an email to shipping, sales etc. that the previous revision has been inactivated… in order to make sure the current orders are correctly modified.
(we have extensive UD info related to each revision copied into orderdtl and orderrel tables. and a rev change has created a lot of issues )
I may suggest is at least look at opened orders, jobs etc where a revision is used, and if active, make a popup to the user changing the revision to make him aware that his change may affect other activity.
There is a flag on the Part I think “Use Revision” and if ticked I think that tells the system to use the revision specified on the Order, if not ticked I think it uses the latest revision.
Simon
Can you provide a snapshot of this check box? what table/field is it?
I could not find it (10.0.700)
For us, creating a sales order, by default only showed the first revision. we had to dropo down the revision list to choose…but which revision is the right one to choose? I had to add code to find the most recent approved revision, to be the first revision to show in the order line.
Pierre
This is where is is @Hogardy. I can’t speak to the use of it though, we just keep everything rev A and do the management outside of E-10.
I did not interpret UseRevision to be UsePartRev… I understood Userevision to be a flag on the revision table to indicate to use THAT revision amongts all approved revisions.
We tick UsePartRev for all our parts… Partrev table has over 30 ud fields, such as package dimensions and weight, parts per package, approved materials to produce the part (list of 5 amongst 100 ) etc… so all information that can be changed and saved as a new revision if needed.
Question:
I noticed that your snapshot had info about per container value…
We will soon going into an upgrade process by June to the latest version. Am I guessing right when I say the container is a package of say 30 units?
If so, I can see that (in my opinion) it is missing a weight/volume of the package itself. Multiplying 30 by unit vol and weight is not accurate for us. As the way the parts ,may be packaged together (saving on volume), or that the package could have a palet holding all the parts together. That palet having a volume of 6 sq ft and a weight of 6.8 kg which augment the weight and the volume of those 30 parts.
Unless this info is elsewhere in the part module?
Pierre
That checkbox is on the Part table, not the PartRev table. So it wouldn’t know which rev was supposed to be “that” revision.
If you look at the help, it seems to mean "Use a specific revision if checked, but if not checked, just used the latest. But it also looks like it only applies to MRP. But 
I don’t know for sure.
I noticed that your snapshot had info about per container value…
That looks like a for reference only field, so I don’t think it will help you without some customization.
@Banderson and @Hogardy, if I am understanding correctly, there is no best practice, you just have to find all open items where the old rev is used and change it to the new one. In the case that the new rev uses a different purchased material than the old rev, how can you be sure that there wasn’t already a PO out there for the old material in the old rev? I am thinking that if we go and start updating all of the revs in jobs and orders, any po’s with the old materials will make us end up ordering double, 1 PO for the old parts and one PO for the material in the new rev…
In short, I was just wondering what other people do when they make a revision change and they want to make that revision effective immediately. How do you handle PO’s that have been created for materials in the old rev, etc.? It won’t be a straightforward answer and not everyone does the same thing.
Thanks for your input! Please share anything else you think is relevant. We are just looking for some examples.
So I will give you my experience with revisions, and how they actually work in my current company. This isn’t best practice, it’s just what we do.
First off for revisions, our general rule for a revision is “can the new part function in place of the old part?”, and if it can’t, it turns into a new part number not a new revision. An example would be added holes. If you are using a totally different material, I would say that requires a new part number. That’s for piece part fabricated parts.
For assemblies, since we are an engineer to order company, we don’t have to get too far up the structure before those numbers become basically job specific, so the part number rule becomes a bit more relaxed. Usually, the revision is driven because there was an error that needed to be corrected, not because of an improvement. Again, this is because of the nature of our business. So when this happens, we find all of the part numbers that are on current jobs via a dashboard that unionizes is the Job Material and Job Assembly tables. We make the necessary adjustments and redistribute travelers/prints as needed.
We manage these revision changes outside of Epicor using a collaboration solution called Clickup. Other versions of a digital scrum board are out there too. Basically, once a revision is requested, as task gets added there, assigned to whoever the next person the process is that needs to do something, and it’s passed down the line until it’s completed and closed.
That’s just what we do, but we are in a low volume high mix business. If you are a high volume manufacturer, I think that using effective dates in E-10 to help you manage the cut over is a better solution.
here is what we do, it depends if the changes has an impact (new volume, weight or parts per package for instance) :
table PODetail has the rev number as well as jobNum as well as OrderDtl table for example.
After approval of a new revision, we lookup those tables (in a BAQ query) to find any “active” records (po not closed, Jobs opened, sales orders not shipped etc… )
and send an email as well as popping up a message to the user.
So this new rev implicates that manual changes are needed. For sales orders, since we copy lots of info from the revision (via BPM), we delete the line and add the part again.
The same for jobs and PO’s.
If no activity has happened on those lines, that is what we do. No automation here. If activity has happened (a sales order release being shipped… for instance, we do not change it ) if the rev changes has an impact (new volume, weight or parts per package) we would close the order and create a new one. same with PO’s and jobs.
Changing revisions keep history of the part.
Pierre
Pierre,
Thank you for detailing your update process, that is helpful.
@Banderson , you said that “you make necessary adjustments,” does that mean you do something like Pierre’s company and go into the jobs, check the po’s, etc? We are also a low volume, high mix manufacturer.
Yeah, it’s all manual and every situation is a little different, so it’s hard to automate something like that. Something as simple is where in the process is everything changes what’s required pretty drastically. You have to think on your feet a bit.
I agree, my colleague and I were discussing a flow chart of some sort for this process. Automating it would be a challenge, but what I really want to be able to do is give the team tools that helps them with the process. I just need to understand it/map it out first.
Thank you both for your input.
A tool that I have made that has proved invaluable is a dashboard that shows all of the jobs that parts are on. We make nearly everything on a make to order job. It’s a great starting point when looking for anything. Great for revision changes, looking for BOM issues, etc. Plus, you can’t search a job for a material part number, and this lets you do that.
Is that a native dashboard that you may be able to export?
You don’t want the whole dashboard. There’s a bunch of stuff specific to this company. Here’s that BAQ though that this tab is built off of. I just added the tracker in there and moved some of the controls around.
JobBom.baq (41.9 KB)
I appreciate it, I will check it out!
