I come from an Technical/IT background but have been tasked with redesigning our Inventory Process. Can anyone provide direction and or material on how Epicor is designed to work with a process.
This is a HUGE topic… Just the word “Inventory” can mean so many things… Are you referring to how you STORE inventory? How you track it? How you count it? Warehouse/Bin arrangement? Pick/Pack/Ship process? Multi-site inventory transfers?
Just trying to narrow down the focus.
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Wow. Are you sure you don’t want to do something easy first, like building a fusion reactor out of spare server parts?
I feel your pain, back in the good old days I was an IT guy and got the same marching orders. Has your company ever taken a full physical inventory, and have you ever participated? Did the company try, fail badly, and that’s why it’s now on your plate?
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hahah… My first few programming projects during my first year at my new job back in 1983 at a manufacturing plant:
- Create a Production tracking system
- Create a Sales Backlog tracking system
- Then… “Hey Tim, can you write a new Inventory tracking system? It needs to also handle lot tracking, and our old system doesnt do that”
- THEN… “Hey Tim, can you write a cycle counting system?”
As a new programmer, it was the absolute BEST way to learn business! within a year, I learned so much that I had never learned before. I had business mentors that didn’t know programming but DID know business. They explained what “Backlog” is, and proper controls on inventory. Mistakes were made, but wow, i learned a ton. @shoebasset, you can take this opportunity and run with a super rich toolset that Epicor provides! You have some learning, but the GOOD news, you don’t have to write it all from scratch like I did.
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That would have been amazing. I’m not a programmer (just ask Jose!), I had just been hired as the “Epicor guy” in a company that had badly failed every semi-annual full physical inventories in memory (variances of over 25% of total value), and were using a home-grown process that almost actively discouraged accuracy. It took two years, but we got the variances down to less than 3% by using the out-of-the-box Epicor functionality.
The things that fixed it? Transaction discipline and continual training (well, and a CFO that cared).
Having pizza and some contests on count day also helped.
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I personally would add a UD field for CreateDate. Also add a BPM to populate that field on GetNew.
Finally!!
And not just Part, quite a few tables I’ve checked.
Out of all of the beasts involved in the Inventory topic - the implementation of physical inventory in E10 is my least favorite. So much so that at my last company I wrote a whole implementation from the ground up.