Long-time listener, first-time caller…
I am new to Epicor, being introduced to it a couple of months ago, and have been silently combing through EpiUsers to help get a better grasp on what I can get out of Epicor. For the past decade, I worked primarily in Operations using Oracle’s ERP.
Looking to get some advice from the experts on a couple of things, but should probably provide a bit of context first:
I was recently hired into an operations role at a small business (< 20 employees), tasked (among other things) to increase efficiencies/productivity/other cookie cutter operations goals/etc. I was very accustomed to strong data integrity and planned to lean into that strength…That said, my initial analysis is our org implemented Epicor with someone who started setting up processes and best practices, but the implementation was never fully completed.
As the subject suggests, I am looking for help on the following:
- Best Practices for bulk part creation
- Best Practices for ECO groups/BOM creation
Where we are at currently - We primarily make long lead time products (3 - 14 months), consisting of thousands of parts that are mostly made in house. For our Sales Orders, we have historically used a single line item representing the finished good. Only recently, we began using multiple items representing multiple “finished” assemblies that are packaged together as a “system”. As for part numbers - we have a handful of generic ones to represent these unique finished goods (the ones with hundreds to thousands of individual parts). From what I could gather, we are not fully utilizing the engineering work bench to build BOMs/create ECO groups either. We have Epicor 10, On Prem, version 10.2.200.12.
Where I would like to get to - Using sensibly structured multi-level BOMs complete with proper subassemblies, operations, and estimated times (eventually), which should allow us to track what is moving through the floor with a much greater degree of accuracy.
Some of the biggest resistances/challenges to changing up our processes have been:
- It would take too long to put the part numbers in (which from what I read, DMT would help with) (I also considered trying to create a form that would allow for bulk imports from excel or streamlined entries, but from what I gathered from other topics - this is not an ideal method)
- When creating jobs, the system currently defaults to include all operations, so that we don’t need to specify which one or how long it might take
- I do not believe anyone (besides myself) has had previous experience creating complex multi-level BOMs
- In general, nobody seems to have a great deal of permissions beyond our contracted IT team (likely by design, but much of what I gather in the topics seems to suggest most businesses have an embedded Epicor “guru” to varying degrees)
I suspect a great deal of this is a result of lack of training, which I am hoping to slowly rectify.
If anyone can point me to any topics, or has any advice on the two main issues, I would greatly appreciate the help. Also, while hiring a consultant or someone with a background in ERP systems (ideally Epicor) would probably be a sound decision, I do not believe it’s a feasible option at the present.
Thanks in advance for any guidance!
