Important note before you read further to understand why I’m bringing this up… We are a custom job shop, 95% engineered to order.
We’re dabbling in a new line of business that is fast paced and uses a lot of common materials for final assembly amongst different customers and configurations. The value of these materials varies and our current company structure wouldn’t support the increase demand to pull these items for each job, so we’re looking at backflushing 5-10 materials to start. We’ve gone through testing, seems to be working as expected and identified a few more scenarios to test so we understand some of the common “what if” scenarios. We have created a new resource group & OP for the assembly of this new line of business.
However, some of these materials may also also be used on a different job where given timeline, job quantity, etc. we “think” there would be value in NOT backflushing that material. Historically we pull materials used in assembly per job based on scheduling, issue them, and put them on a designated cart for that job and would like to maintain that some process.
I know the backflush is a part level setting and can be unchecked at job level if needed. Has anyone ever worked something in that says if material is used at related OP “BUILD” then backflush flag at job level is true when the method is pulled in, but can still be manually adjusted at job creation if desired. But if material is used at related OP “ASSEMBLY” then backflush flag at job level is “false” when the method is pulled in.
I’m sure a BPM could do it - not sure we want to go through that amount of effort at this exact moment in time, but may see more value a few months down the road. Just wanted to toss it out there and see if anyone has some words of wisdom.
We don’t have anything set up for this at the moment but have thought the same thing before. I find it slightly odd I can choose to backflush a material on a job (overwriting the site default for a Part) but I can’t set this in the engineering workbench, surely a checkbox there would make sense because in some methods we always backflush at that stage?
Be interesting to follow this post and see if anyone has done anything
I believe your options are adjust jobs manually as needed or create a BPM.
This topic comes up from time to time and another solution that gets floated is to not have the material be related to an operation in the MOM on the parts where you do not want backflushing turned on, as that is a requirement for backflushing. Seems a bit wonky to me though so ymmv.
This was another avenue we talked about internally and double checked engineering workbench to make sure an update didn’t provide this functionality and we just weren’t aware.
This sounds like a good submission for an Epicor Idea if there isn’t one existing already…I’ll look into that in the coming days. If someone beats me to it let me know so I can go vote!
Why not use Mass Issue - it’s the best of both worlds.
You can choose to issue all of the material to the job in one step.
In other cases, you may want to select all and then uncheck a few that didn’t get issued because of shortages.
One alternative is that you can use the Job Completion/Closing to backflush the material. It is more manual, but would accomplish what you want.
I believe the functionality in the screen checks to see if material has been issued, and if it has, does not backflush again. I would test though as I could be hallucinating.
My ideal scenario would be for a backflush checkbox to be added to engineering workbench, like previously mentioned.
Our “fix” was to alter the related operations. I have outlined the steps we used in a previous post. It’s a bit wonky to set up and may depend on your operation/resource configuration, but it’s worked well for us.
Thanks for putting this in, you did a great job capturing everything in your write up. Myself and two others voted for it today; we’re all hoping to see it get some traction!
Thanks! I think it has some good use cases not just for us as but for lots of you guys going off this thread, so fingers crossed this is something that gets added in
