When receiving a serial tracked part into inventory from a job, is there a way natively to default the serial number assigned as the job number, or am I moving in to BPM land to accomplish this? Job quantity will only always ever be a qty of 1.
Why not use Lot Number instead then? If every job only has a quantity of 1, Lot Number is basically the same as Serial Number and you can default the Job Number.
that’s a great question! Trying to explore options here, we’ve always been a solely make direct model and now I’m tasked to coming up with a finished goods model in addition so i need to explore traceability, whether it’s lot or serial number, just not sure of all the pro’s and con’s of either one.
Then I believe the real question is what level of traceability you need. Lot and Serial are both set up to allow jobs to be cut with quantities more than 1 and then the level of detail determines which one to use.
If your production floor is real good, you could release a job for 20 and still know exactly what was done when by the operator reporting each individual (or group of) part in MES. Every single serial number will need to be identified on every operation.
Great discussion, i think you are right, we currently have to maintain a device history record for each piece we make (class 3 medical device) and we are moving towards an EDHR in the future only serialization would afford us that tractability if we made more than one piece per job (were not that good lol). However, if the absolute were 1 piece per job then Lot Number would afford the same level of tractability. Would you agree?
Absolutely. If every job only has a quantity of 1, then Lot Number can be used interchangeably with Serial Number. The only real difference is Lot Number will be easier 
If you ever want to move forward with reducing the number of jobs, you could always switch to Serial Number.
that’s fair, we’ve discussed multiple qty’s per job and for many reasons we decided the best model for us was to pursue a 1 piece flow practice. I appreciate your insight!
Don’t think there is a native way to do what you are asking.
We have multiple medical SN parts per job. We even have serialized parts within the BOM. The SN assignment/Matching takes care of the traceability for the jobs. We do have a few UD fields which are managed by BPMs to set the original job, assembly, ship date, and what not. The nice thing here is we leverage the SNTran table for reporting/audits.
Our final FDA - DHR lists each Parent Part Top level SN and all SN contained.
I guess it all depends on your requirements and process. The hard part would be to make changes down the road when the QTY per job is greater than 1. There might be a lot of backfill changes that would need to occur, that might be saved by small changes today.
Rob,
Or anyone else for that matter. Did you ever implement an eDHR solution?
Thanks,
Steve