It seems there are tradeoffs in the granularity of sites. For example, if you have a complex of buildings where different operations are performed, should they be different sites? More sites means more setup, more PartPlant records, etc., but might also bring some advantages. On the other hand, I’ve seen sites set up on a more conceptual level, for example a “manufacturing” site encompassing more than one physical address.
What are some of the criteria for making something a different site? Like maybe you’d make a building a different site if you wanted to track costs of moving materials to and from it… just guessing here.
(I believe) Epicor Help includes a link to the PDF “Multi-Site Company Setup Technical Reference Guide”. Where one of the first sections is “Multi-Site Concepts”… might help.
That document does provide some examples of when you might want a different site, such as when manufacturing centers have different production schedules. But in some ways, the examples they give are radically different from what I’ve seen in practice:
Your company manufactures pencils. One site shapes the wood required for each pencil, drills the hole for the lead, and then packs the lead inside each pencil. Another site manufactures the erasers for the ends of each pencil. Then a third site attaches the erasers to each pencil body. In order to define the production schedules, costing methods, and inventory processes, you create the WOOD, ERASER, and ASSBLY sites.
Maybe that’s just a terribly contrived example, but those sound like operations to me, not reasons to create sites. That’s why I’m curious what people have actually done in practice.
The fact that you can have employees locked out of a site, that’s a big one. I don’t like people switching from one site to another and forgetting where they are.
We have different PO numbers for each site (a hack I did), and how on earth could you accomplish that in a single site?! My hack (a BPM) relies on what the “current plant” is.
But then, I can see how our mfg. plant could be split into two sites. But I had made it two warehouses a while back and that alone drives people bonkers, so two sites would just kill them. (I did it to facilitate a barcoding plan that never got off the ground.)
