We now have 5 plants. I have been asked if possible to launch Order entry according to the customer default plant.
At first, I thought of loading a customer list dashboard, and then the user would do right click /open with on the customer ID, and having all 5 Order Entry menus for each plant. Choose the right one.
But How do I make sure the selected menu opens in a specific plant ?
A way I will provide is create 5 tiles on their main vue, one for each plant. (that would work for awhile but not a long term solution…)
But ideally, I would love to only needing to use one open with menu, and pass along the customer default plant during launch.
How are you defining your customer “Default Plant”?
EDIT: Order Entry doesn’t open in a specific “plant”, only the Order Release specifies which plant the item is to ship from. It might just be easier to use whatever functionality you have right now to define a default plant and just assign each release for that customer to that plant.
I mean do what you want, but this might be an opportunity to ask if the benefit of this feature is worth the effort.
It must be in human nature, because I routinely see people asking for some piece of data to be defaulted in when they open x dashboard. Most of the time, IMO, this is data that should not be defaulted in, and in fact, it would be best if it was left blank, forcing the person to make the correct decision every time. Defaulting in data can provide the illusion of efficiency but on the flipside can lead to mistakes when the default isn’t the correct value.
People get very hung up on these little way to be more ‘efficient’ that don’t really seem that worthwhile or exciting to me. Using Epicor as it comes is not inherently inefficient.
The day someone having to choose the correct value from a dropdown menu is my company’s biggest problem I will be doing my job from a beach in Tahiti.
I think I agree more with Ernie’s solution, to default release plant based on … We have 3 plants and share ordering and parts from each. I have not setup a bpm to make it come from correct plant, but we use product group sales plant to default most of the time. Can you store a plant for a customer on UD field on customer (shipto?) and default that on sales order releases w that id on order?
Yes.
We have a UD field on the Customer table indicating this. I guess it was for avoiding erreurs in the release plants…
But if I open an order using the base version of Order Entry, Only one plant is available to choose from, the current plant when the form was opened with…
hence unable to choose from other plants…
Unless if I force it to the customer plant it can be saved anyway… I will need to test…
I agree in spirit Garret but not in truth. We have thousands of parts shared among 3 plants and probably about 15 people doing order entry. That is a herd of cats we have not been able to tame! Defaulting in as much as we can to make the order not need a planner checking every one is what we find we need most.
Looks like there is other stuff here relating to customers, parts, and plants… so whatever solution you devise will need to be incorporated into what’s already in place. Make sure each plant is assigned to every part number, and that every salesperson userID has access to each plant as well. Out of the box, any user in order entry should be able to specify any plant that a particular part has assigned.
But works well when I open the module via tiles because the plant is part of it. I kind of want to recreate that but via a open with…call order entry the same as with the tile…forcing the plant in the call of the module…
How would I acheive that?
Check the exact menu path that the tile opens… likely there is a customization on that Order Entry menu item (I think the default tile menu path is via Customer Relationship Management > Operations > Order Entry). You can either change the path on everyone’s tile OR you can add the customization onto Sales Management > Operations > Order Entry.
EDIT: but beware… you may be customizing onto an already existing customization… it would be best if you know exactly what you’re trying to graft onto…
Actually, what would solve my need is the following:
Launch a menu by forcing the plant when opening. To simulate how the tiles work when we can spécify for which plant the tile will open under.
How do I do that?
I thought of using the open with feature under the client ID, showing 5 different menu to open Order Entry , one for each plant, which would open a UD form having code to launch Order Entry under the desired plant, then close the udForm.
So I only need to know how (in code) I can launch a menu specifiying the plant it is opening under…to simulate how tiles work…
Unless there is a way to call a Launch of a specific Tile … ?
Consider that Product Group and define the plant the product is provided from.
So when you are adding the products, the product group could change the plant.
The whole idea behind all this is the following:
User starts to enter a new order comes at the end to realize the plant/warehouse is not available, because he should have been in the correct plant to begin with. Has to redo the order.
That is why we added the default plant to customer and if the user is creating a new order I got code to go verify if it is the default plant of the customer and if not, showing the message to the user YES/No to continue (it is possible customer have parts from 2 different plants.
So since the addition of the 3 new plants. I am thinking a better way would be to have a dashboard of all our customers that the user would pick from (that is what they came up with) and upon the right customer search, right click /open with order entry, using the customer default plant as the module plant ID…
What is the proper way in code to force a plant upon opening a module. Like passing a session to the module having a different plant then the current one. like Epicor is still open as plant A. But order entry opens as using plant B.
That should not be the case unless you have some other customization in place. We can always pick any site for which a part-plant record exists on the release even when the current context is a different site, even when the user doesn’t have that site in their permissions. They should be able to just change it when they notice the error not start the order from scratch.
I am interested in this topic because we have the same struggle with orders going into the wrong sites. The problem is there is no clear cut rule about which site is the “right” site thus difficult to propose any solutions. I had thought about the same kind of idea where the default site is specified on the customer’s ship to, and then once the ship to is specified, the context is forced to that customer’s site. But the problem is you can’t change the context once you are already in order entry, so like you said it would have to be from a dashboard or some other screen where they first pick the customer and ship to before actually beginning the order. Not a simple customization.
And on top of that Epicor doesn’t always put the releases in the current site context anyway so you would still have to write some bpms on the get new release method to override Epicor’s logic for picking the site. So then why bother with the launching context thing to begin with, just skip that and go straight to the bpm.
We had a customer with a simliar requirement, they have > 10 sites but wanted to enter orders from a central location but delivery being made from any of their sites, rahter than link a customer to a delivery site (which didn’t work for them) we added a drop down to the Order Header which was then inherited by every line/release by default. The order is then created in the correct delivery site regardless of which site it was entered into - saved them hours!
I’m curious - so they were manually deciding where the order should get filled from when they were entering the order? Or somebody was coming back and changing that value after the fact? How were they deciding which site to pick?
We have thousands of parts shared among 3 plants and probably about 15 people doing order entry. That is a herd of cats we have not been able to tame! Defaulting in as much as we can to make the order not need a planner checking every one is what we find we need most.