The product that we manufacture is always make to order. We use product configurators to build the methods for the part, this creates a part number specific to this order line so the part that we are manufacturing does not exist in the part master.
We want to be able to assign a serial number to the final manufactured part., I don’t think Kinetic serial tracking will do this unless the part we are making exists?
So, first question is am I correct in thinking that I cannot serial track the final product unless the part exists with the track serial numbers check box ticked?
Assuming this is the case, what have other people done?
Options I am thinking about are that we create the part each time, the main issue with this would be the number of parts slowly accumulating in the database, but it should work?
We could always manufacture the same part number (the base part) and identify the finished products them by their serial number, I feel that the significance of this change to the business and supporting processes would make this not an option.
Create a serial tracked material (a label perhaps) that gets issued to each job? I am not familiar with serial matching process, but would this provide an solution?
Would love to hear other peoples experiences / ideas.
Since Vantage 8, we serialized configured parts without a part number. We checked the serialize flag on the base part. That was it. Not sure if that behavior has changed since V9.
We currently serialize the base part number and have a UD field with a “Pseudo Part Number” - basically a smart string. These parts are average costed and made direct, so margin is just as good as the transactions on the job. If you don’t clock labor (e.g. just do a start-end activity without being logged into a time and quantity operation) Epicor will show higher margins than you actually had.
I was at a different company that added parts to the part master via the configurator. The process was smart enough to know if a configuration already existed in the part master, built methods properly, serial tracked the parts with the proper mask, etc. What was great about having those parts in the part master was we could standard cost them before shipping using the configurator rules in the methods. Also, if we did an update to the configuration we could run the process to verify the parts and methods created by your configurator and “automagically” update them.
Some people shy away from having too many parts in the part master, but I’ve been at companies with hundreds of thousands of parts. The only time we’ve run into issues have been doing an annual cost roll (split them out by product group and ran on a VM server to get it to finish) or poorly written BAQs.
Having a test environment to try these in is always your best option. Epicor provides many options and each company needs to find what works for them.
Thanks for the comments. We have discussed creating a part every time and it presents a couple of issues. One is that the order line can’t be re-configured, the other is that our configurators are available through the commerce connect web site and I think creating parts could cause a huge headache if they are coming from the web based configurators. We could end up with all sorts of mess.
We are playing around with a few options still in out development environment, but are also coming to a conclusion that we may need to come up with our own solution (reluctantly).
I will provide further updates as we work through it.