Here is our situation. We buy raw material in 4x8 sheets with a thickness of either 3 or 4 inches. The actual thickness required for jobs varies between .5 inch and the full 4 inches. When a job requires 2-inch thick material 4-inch raw material is often cut in half. Then the required part is cut out of one-half of the 4-inch raw material. The result is often more than one and half sheets of 2-inch material that can be reused.
At the moment this remaining material is scrapped not salvaged so Epicor has no idea its there. Yet with so much useful material we don’t toss it. It will get used on jobs, but can’t be issued. This causes all the cost for the 4-inch sheet to hit jobs that the operators can’t cut from left-over material, while other jobs have no cost because scrap isn’t issued to the job, so the OP has no material. This is also a problem when closing a job.
It’s not unlike other topics I have read on the forum but it seems many have stayed away from salvaging to different part numbers. My thought is to create a part number for our most commonly salvaged thickness. In the situation above I would salvage the 4-inch as 1.5 sheets of the 2-inch part number. Seems simple but there are some gotchas.
We don’t just have one type of 3 or 4-inch raw material. There are dozens. This means many new part numbers to account for all the various raw material types and possible thicknesses we salvage. I don’t see the issue as every size and length of bolt we have has its own part number, but I have received push back from the operators.
Lastly, if I return various sizes of salvaged material, of the same type and thickness to a bin, how do I know what size sheets are in the bin? In the above example, I put back 1 full 2-inch sheet and .5 of a 2-inch sheet. It will look like 1.5 sheets of inventory. This gets out of hand over time. I could have 10 sheets totals, but all made up of .25 sheets. This could make them unusable for some jobs that require full sheets. Maybe this just needs to be left up to the operator. Check the stock level. Yes we have 10 sheets of 2-inch in the salvage bin. If nothing is big enough for the job then issue 4-inch and cut it in half. Then salvage as 2-inch material.
Love to know everyone’s thoughts. I am new here and just started back with Epicor after working on different ERPs for quite a while. I missed a lot.
