New user of Epicor so bare with me!
Does Epicor kinetic have revision control on Order Entry & Part Entry?
Epicor has part revision control. Most screens allow you to specify the revision to be used. Sales orders allow you to sell a specific part and rev, purchase orders allow you to buy a specific rev. Jobs will produce a specific rev.
You can have multiple revisions of a part, they can be active or inactive. You can attach documents to your revs.
Customer and supplier part cross references allow you to map to specific revs as well.
I heard you can or will be able to inventory by revision as well. this is new, I havent tried it.
Hopefully this helps, it’s baked into Kinetic.
thanks
Do note that while Epicor supports part revisions, it doesn’t really have revision control, where you can easily roll back mistakes. Users can pull approved revisions, overwrite them and then push them back with only a free form comment field and a user/date stamp as evidence that anything happened.
You’d have to add your own custom control system (which is doable, I’ve done it) if you need that level of control.
Hi
yes that is what I thought. I will look at adding custom control as I think without it it will become abused and cause issues
thanks
It absolutely will be abused and it will cause issues.
Out of interest do you have a screen dump of what your Revision control looks like. Would be great starting point for how I would build in the feature
Regards
The gist of the idea is that a rev can only be approved once. I have a custom field on PartRev that permanently tags (un)approval data (since the base system wipes approval date when it’s unapproved) and if that custom date is not null, it rejects the check in. Engineering already wanted to log who was marking things unapproved already, so bootstrapping that as the basis for the control seemed to dovetail nicely.
The base premise is extremely simple, no? There is more to it, but most of that is involved in auto-incrementing the internal revision (which is appended to the customer revision) and copying rev level data to new revisions. Plus, you have to disallow the deletion of once-approved revisions too. Note that this is a data directive because you can edit revision data from Part Entry or Engineering Workbench.
The system works well enough that I haven’t even needed to expand the override (labelled “NotMe” in the screenshot) to anyone beyond myself. And we do hundreds of revisions per month. This isn’t the only way to go about this (you can also restrict how people use Engineering Workbench), but it’s worked well enough for us. I might have gone the function route instead of data directive if I was doing it today.
thanks for that
great help
Be aware that if you’re building to stock, the system will not care which revision you have on your sales order, it will pull the approved revision with the latest effective date into the planning job. If you are building to order (make direct) I think it will honor the revision.
You will not want your engineers to have a new revision under development and approved in the system. It’s best practice to have only one revision approved at a time.
One other revision consideration. A part number can only have one cost assigned. So if you build a part using 3 different revisions 3 different ways and those all have different costs, accounting will likely want them splilt into 3 different part numbers for margin calculation and pricing.
A revision is a ‘Method’ revision. If you want the revision to match the customer’s revision it could get painful, but it’s not impossible. One of our business units has part numbers consisting of CustPN + CustRev + : + Internal number. Internal number increments when there is a costing change. As for the method revision, this denotes prototype, first time build or production revision 00 01, 02 etc. It’s rough.
As of the latest version (with appropriate licencing) you are able to hold on hand quantities at the Part/Rev level