How Should the Flow of Creating New Parts Look?

Epicor ERP 10
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Hello all,

We have recently been receiving a high volume of new parts from customers, and our old process for handling them has become inefficient. We operate in a Make to Stock manufacturing environment, and we need a workflow that minimizes manual intervention while ensuring MRP generates the correct job suggestions.

Old Process:

  1. Receive PO from customers
  2. Enter Sales Order
  3. If the part is new → Stop → Email Engineers to route the part
  4. Engineers email back once routing and revisions are approved
  5. Re-enter the part on the Sales Order

Desired MRP Outcome:

  • Make Direct Flag stays off
  • Unfirm job suggestions created as Make to Stock

New Process (Implemented):

  1. Receive PO from customers
  2. Enter Sales Order
  3. If the part is new → Enter as Part-on-the-Fly (POTF) on the Sales Order
  4. POTF appears on the “Engineer To-Do List” (custom dashboard)
  5. Engineers create the part, approve revisions

Issue:

  • Sales Orders with POTF automatically get the Make Direct flag enabled

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  • Even after the part is fully created, the flag remains and cannot be edited

  • MRP still generates Make to Order job suggestions instead of Make to Stock

I attempted to resolve this by creating a BPM to uncheck the Make Direct flag, but MRP continues to generate Make to Order job suggestions.

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Question:

How should our new process be structured to allow POTF entry while ensuring MRP properly generates Make to Stock suggestions instead of Make to Order?

TL;DR:

We are transitioning from a manual, email-heavy new part creation process to an automated Part-on-the-Fly (POTF) system to improve efficiency. However, POTF parts automatically enable the Make Direct flag, preventing MRP from generating Make to Stock job suggestions. Even with a BPM to uncheck the flag, MRP still defaults to Make to Order. We need a workflow solution that allows us to enter POTF parts without triggering Make Direct behavior, ensuring MRP correctly suggests Make to Stock jobs.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!

1 Like
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At the order entry level, once you entered the non existing “part-on-the-fly” partnum, you could have a button that, once clicked, would create the part with minimal config, including the necessary to make it make-to-stock. That “New part” would then trigger the engineering To-Do, so that engineering need to make the final adjustments on the part and revision.

7 Likes
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Would you be able to use the quote module? MRP won’t see the demand until it is converted to a sales order. Engineers can engineer the part method right in the quote, even flag it as a template and pull it in as the method when they get the actual part setup.
I’ve used this successfully in several companies. If you want to get fancy, you could even setup a task set for new part in the quote and route it through engineering…
Jenn

1 Like
4

Hi Mathieu,

Thanks for the insight. It is indeed a great suggestion, why havent I thought of that? Will give it ago and let you know how it turns out.

5

Thanks Jenn for the reply. Currently we havent utilized the Quote Module in our business process yet but I will definitely test out its use case in the future.

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Got it to work using BPM. Thanks Mathieu for pointing me in the right direction.