Is there anyway to get MRP to look at alternate part numbers when calculating supply against demand?
example?
you have demand for part X of 100 , you have 80 on hand. part Y is an alternate of x and you have 100 on hand of part Y. MRP runs and doesn’t create a suggestion because you have enough inventory between the main part and the alternate part (80 +100) to satisfy the demand of the part. And the pick list would show the alternate part number.
Morning Craig (long time no see…)!
This is not a default functionality in Epicor. I’m working with a client now who has the same request, and my Development team is working on a customization to fulfill it. What they’ve run into is that this will make an MRP run take longer than it does now (extra processing), so the real gotcha is how big is your MRP time window?
I figured there wasnt an out of the box solution but i thought i would ask.
How much did it increase the run time?
We haven’t run it yet, still in the quoting stage. This client has a pretty large MRP window, and a typically short MRP run time, so we’re not that worried… but when I was talking it over with the Development folks that’s what they said would be the biggest limiting factor.
Thanks.
Ernie, did y’all ever complete this customization and are they still running it?
@utaylor , they fixed some of the alternate part functionality a while back. Have you tried using the out of the box functionality recently?
Would love to hear more about this John, we are still on 10.2.500 at this company. Would love to know what changes they made and when.
It was around that time. I never tested the full alternate/substitute part functionality, but I do know that the system will now substitute a part that is marked as run out in MRP when there is not enough of the original part to meet demand.
An example is that you have a gasket you use and you find out it is being discontinued. You figure out what gasket you are going to use to replace it. You mark the original as run out and put the new part behind it as an alternate/substitute. You leave the MOM the same. When MRP runs, it will put the original gasket on the job until there is not enough supply. Then it will switch to the new part number. The only thing it does not do is use up “all” of the inventory of the old part.
That’s great, let me try this out, crossing my fingers that it’s available in 10.2.500.
Runout and alternate parts have worked for a very long time… not exactly sure when it was added, but long enough ago that I remember teaching it. you create the alternate part number and check the runout checkbox on the part, and it should work.
It was sometime after 2019 that it was fixed. I had tested it at the company that I was working at, and it did not work. There was an accepted PRB and it was fixed at some point in 2019 or 2020.
Thanks Tim!
That’s about when I started and when we upgraded from 10.0 to 10.2.500
We did not program this customization. To the best of my knowledge, the customer eventually wrote it themselves (I saw it at the go-live), but I don’t know how they made it work.
Hi John,
I just want to confirm my understanding.. If I set up a part as “run out” and assigned an alternate, will the alternate automatically replace it on the MOM during the next MRP run if there isn’t enough quantity on hand of the “run out” part? Or is that something that needs to be updated manually?
I’m testing it now but not seeing any changes, so I might be missing a step. Also, do both parts need to have the same UOM?
It was a while ago that I had set it up, and unfortunately, Epicor’s help really sucks now. I tried finding some documentation on it, but could not.
What Alternate Type did you choose for it? Substitute or Complement? I think it should be Complement.
Yeah I am also having a hard time finding any documentation but would absolutely love if I could figure out how to get it to work as you mentioned.
Originally, I did have it set up as Substitute. I did just go in and change to Complement, deleted my previous unfirmed job and re-ran MRP. Still getting an unfirmed job with the ‘run out’ part even though I have no stock of that but gave myself some stock of the alternate part.
Do you have any on order? Maybe you need to make the original part inactive too?
No, nothing on order.
Basically, the goal is to have two versions of the same part (different part number), where MRP recognizes that one can be used in place of the other. For example, sometimes we order paint in kits, but the same paint also comes in tubes. Ideally, MRP would identify that, instead of suggesting we purchase more kits that we can use the tubes we already have on hand.
We wouldn’t want the original part to be inactive, since both versions would be usable.
Maybe the alternate part setup wouldn’t be a solution here?