Does anyone know the Epicor “Best Pratice”, or have a suggested pratice based on past experience, for whether ECO Groups should be used once and Closed or re-used over and over again? I searched through a few other posts in this forum and there doesn’t seem to be any need to close ECO Groups in Engineering Workbench. However, I’m building End User Procedures for the folks who create MOMs in Engineering Workbench, and I’m wondering if I should suggest closing each ECO Group after they make thier part revisions or instruct them to just check in all the part’s revision and reuse the same ECO Group next time they need to update any other part.
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It depends on whether you use workflows. It sounds like you do not, so I would say leaving them open is fine.
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That’s a good question. We have a hodge-podge. Our Engineers will have a group they use over-and-over, those stay open.
And we also have some groups that we use for particular sales orders/projects. If I look in the system, some are closed, but most are still open.
I THINK the difference (in how they use them) is they will mark their individual ECO groups as “single user”.
The groups they create for particular orders/projects they leave open so multiple people can work in the same group and they can lock individual revisions within the group (if they wish).
For the most part, I don’t think it matters. You can close a group, but you can also go in at any point and re-open it. I suppose it may serve as a “flag” for some reports where you could query against closed ECO’s? I dunno.
I don’t think closing is all that critical, but would be interested to hear if there is a deeper purpose, perhaps tied to project billings, or something else I haven’t considered.
… ahh, see, @jkane already has something I didn’t consider, while I was typing. We don’t use Workflows, so… didn’t know this was a factor! Good to know!
We do not. I really want to explore this as we deepen our utilization of Epicor, but for now we do not.
We do use Projects. I think I asked our Operations Consultant a long time ago and he didn’t believe it was anythign other than a flag for categorization/reporting purposes. But I don’t know that I ever recieved a very firm answer that there is no backend functionality, even if it only affects table maintenance or something the end user would never see.
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If you use the workflow and set it up the correct way, once the ECO Group is closed, you cannot use it again. Here is a screenshot showing I could “re-open” a group, but as you see, you cannot check out or in.
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Gotcha!
This is really neat and I think Engineering Workbench is the first palce I want to introduce workflows into our organization. Thanks for sharing, I may borrow this idea!
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we are going to learn more about it in a couple weeks because we are trying to implement something to help manage changes to existing bills of material in response to a process change or material change and we think that this could help.
Thanks lol. I was brought in off the street with no knowledge of ERPs and did our migration from our legacy ERP to Epicor 4 years ago. We’ve been live for 3 years. It’s been a journey, and I’m still such a rookie. But, in talking with a lot of great folks at Epicor and on the forums, it seems like the only way to really learn this stuff is the trial-by-fire, figure-it-out-as-you-go mentality. I’ve loved the community on here, even though I’m no engineer 
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I’m an Engineer by education… but Polymer Engineering doesn’t really apply… so, I’m right there with you when it comes to this stuff!
That sounds great. I’d love to hear how it goes. I think we have area to improve in the Part and MOM creation stage of things because we don’t pay enough attention to UOMs and downstream purchasing and issuing materials needs. We got burned on that early and have learned, but a WorkFlow that helps ensure we make the right considerations would really help.
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You speak the truth…and, sadly, many of our trials resemble…
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