Good morning all you fine folks!
I have asked about this topic in the past, but we are looking at a specific solution this time. I would like to run it by you all to see what you think and if there are any major issues we might be missing.
Currently we run all of our jobs as make to order. The demand comes from the sales order and could have may demand links. Some jobs have hundreds of releases as demand, spanning multiple sales orders. We also don’t split jobs in Epicor, even though we split them on the floor. We maintain paperwork to keep everything straight, but we want to start splitting in Epicor.
One suggestion to make job splitting trivially easy is to switch to a make to stock approach. Then each job can be split arbitrarily without regard for the underlying sales order demand. Based on this, we are testing this approach.
We setup a new job, and we want to make to stock. but we can’t make the new job to stock straight away, we still need some way to link it to the sale order demand. If nothing else, at least to pull in the PO comments that get added to the sales order.
The approach we are testing is as follows: Test Process for Make to Stock Jobs
Enter sales order and demand.
Copy/Paste PO comments into sales order as needed.
Review demand and determine job size.
Create new job based on first release of sales order.
This pulls in PO comments attached to the sales order.
Remove sales order demand link from new job.
Add new make to stock demand link based on job size.
Engineer and release job to schedule date. Will default to first release date, update as needed.
Let job progress through the shop naturally.
Document time and quantity against operations for this job.
Create POs for subcontract operations.
Receive parts against subcontract POs.
Split job quantity to new job as needed.
Prepare customer shipment entry.
Enter sales order number (where will shipper find this?)
Select correct sales order release to ship against, enter the correct quantity.
I’m curious if this will work. If you “make to stock”, don’t you need to receive-to and then ship-from inventory? Can you perform a MFG-CUS transaction in this case? I’ve never tried to ship directly from a stock job.
No. That was a big part of our test today. I completed the last op, but I didnt set to auto receive into inventory. I assume this leaves the parts on the job. So, my part transaction still says MFG-CUS.
Huh. And you have no demand links for sales orders???
So, we have an inverse procedure here (but equally as odd), where there are jobs that are make to order but we receive them to stock. Especially R&D trucks we make. And in our scenario, I can’t ship the stock quantity; it has to go back to WIP first. (And that’s better honestly.)
I agree! We are testing on our end, but are not sure what to look out for. Some of the things you suggested were on our list and other were not. I will keep researching.
Correct. Once I created the job using the first sales order release as the start, it pulled in all the details from the sales order that I needed. Next I delete the demand on that job, and add in new make to stock demand.
From what I remember of those days we called the correction process the great unwinding.
You can ship and invoice from the job , but it did not update the JobProd record since it was expecting a MFG-STK.
Then we had to cancel the invoice, undo the shipment from the job (with the stage unstage trick), put the finished goods in stock, reship the quantities with the same tracking number and then reinvoice.
I would love to consider this more. As it is, this seems impossible for us. We need that link to the sales order line and release. Some customers require it on their packing slip, and we use it to help keep everything straight. No question, we are a job shop and only make parts when we have an order for them. We never make parts ahead specifically for stock. The only stock we ever put in inventory is overage run on the job that can be shipped.
I have to do flow downs from the sales order to the job and made a soft link on the mts JobProd for the order/line/release or you can also like @klincecum is suggesting use the order-line-release format for the job.
We stopped doing that because it stopped the humans from going to the warehouse and looking for the over runs we had put into stock assuming this job was the correct supply for the order since the job implied it was for that order.
That would make way too many jobs on our floor. We have too many releases and making a new job for every single one would just be crazy.
This is just how it has always been done. I am trying to get away from the way we always work and get our process to align better with Epicor. Similar to Kevin’s point, if I make a new job for every release, it would create potentially hundreds of jobs when only a handful of jobs would do the trick.
It started as a routine from E9 so they are Number01, 02 and 03 on JobProd for order/line/release…
If the job is made in job entry I have a DD on JobProd that does the same kinds of things that a make direct would do like check the PartNums match on the lines and copies order data from the header to the job. This could replace the one make direct you are adding and removing.
I also have a MTS dashboard that our planners paste into from excel that makes the job and does this same soft link process in a ubaq. I could clean it of our odd routines and give you the base to start from if you wanted.
Interesting approach! Let me see if we can figure out a method on our end. I may very well end up heading to a hybrid approach similar to what you are using.
