We have a part that originally had 1 customer. A 2nd customer came around and wants the same part, however they would like a certain point in the operation for it to get some extra checks creating a new method for the same part.
Is this something that an alternate method could fix? Before it got to me the company simply made a 2nd revision and switches between them based on who is ordering. Can anyone give me some insight on alternate methods or a possible better solution?
The alternate method functionality is meant to be used for a part that can be manufactured in two of your plants that have different machines. In the main plant, it only takes 5 operations because of a machine that combines two operations into one. But in the other plant, they don’t have that machine, so they actually have 6 operations as they have two machines to do what one machine can do in the other plant. Or any other reason that you could think of as to why something is manufactured differently in your different plants.
You can use the alternate methods to do what you are asking, but it is a manual process. There really is nothing out of the box that would do what you want.
So what you are saying is to basically select the alternate method when customer 2 orders versus order 1 which isn’t much different than what they are currently doing with 2 revisions of the part being selected.
That is unfortunate.
Actually though, you cannot select an alternate revision at the sales order level. They would only be able to select it once the job is created. So it would look like every order is getting the same exact part.
At this point that is what is happening so would switching to the Alt Method remove that issue?
No.
So the only way to resolve the issue would be? Creating a new part?
Depends. When a customer orders the part, do they both use the same part number? That is they both order part X on their PO.
Yes they do.
If they actually used a different part number, you might have been able to control it with a Customer Part cross reference.
I think that the separate revisions is the best solution. I would look at creating a BPM to set the revision of the part based on the customer.