Has anyone figured out a way to get Epicor Forecast Entry to function by Part Revision? I have had several customers who sell the same Part with multiple enabled revisions, but currently the Epicor forecast entry only works with the most recent effective revision.
Reason 427: If you need to have multiple revs of a part in inventory then it’s probably a candidate for a different part. Put the rev in the part number.
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Unfortunately, it would be against government regulation for these customers to change the part number and revision of their parts without going through USDOT and having to redo their CFR certification for a part to accomplish changing a part number. They probably will not desire to do that.
In the Part Entry form, there is a “Use Part Rev” checkbox (that is checked by default) that tells Epicor to ALWAYS use the most recent approved revision (based on Revision Effective Date). If you UNCHECK that box, you can specify the revision you need at the Sales Order level.
WARNING: sometimes Epicor ignores this flag… like if MRP creates a job to fulfill a Min On Hand inventory demand.
There is no Revision field on Forecast Entry.
You can try adding a UD field in Forecast Entry for Revision Num and update PartDtl RevisionNum with that value using a BPM. Run MRP and check the suggestion.
Now there is an idea. Ill have to DotPeek the DLL for MRP and see if I can pick up where the process starts looking at the Revision number of the MOM to pull the job details and see if I can intercept that place in the process.
Thanks for the feedback.
So I gave this idea a testing out. I was able to get the Revision to populate into the PartDtl table and there was already a Part REvision field on that table so I was easily able to populate the revision form the forecast UD field.
But then I discovered that Epicor MRP completely ignores that PartDtl field and will override it with the most recent approved revision. Im not even sure why a revision field is on PartDetail if Epicor just ignores it anyway.
I adjusted the Part table to not have “UsePartRev” checked, and I set the Effective date of both revisions to the same date… and Epicor MRP still chose the most recent revision.
Why not create new part numbers and put the Customer part number in the Customer Part Number field? That way they could get to separate part numbers but not tell the customer.
Because not telling the customer, in this case the United States Government; would be a felony.
The Sales Order with revisions thing seems like your best bet, imho.
I probably would never recommend putting up phantom sales orders in Epicor to workaround a limitation of the software unless it was a last resort.
That’s not what I’m saying. I am suggesting that you change from a forecast driven demand model to a sales order driven demand model, so you can specify the revision needed on the sales order.
Unsure how that plays out when you run MRP, you’d have to test that.