How would you? - Manage & price parts with subassembly and service options?

I’ve been asked to help improve the method of pricing parts, along with evaluating the way we use Epicor for part entry. I’m fairly new to this, so looking for some wisdom/ideas to consider.

We are a custom tooling manufacturer. Currently, custom tooling pricing is done outside of Epicor through a series of spreadsheets and price lists. Engineering provides fundamental data needed to generate a price for a quote. This data is passed to customer service, where they run it through the spreadsheets to determine a new manufactured price.

While determining the new manufactured price, they also determine two additional prices for future service work for that part (one for “repair and sharpen” and one for “sharpen only”). This pricing stays as a PDF in a quotes folder.

If the quote is accepted, engineering then adds the part into Epicor and builds out the routing for the new manufactured part. Additionally, they add two other parts numbers for the service work options (one with a suffix of -RS, repair and sharpen, and one with-S, sharpen only. Our price list then has the three prices generated above added to Epicor.

Example part numbers at this point may be:

200-12345-9000
200-12345-9000-RS
200-12345-9000-S

These part numbers, however, are just assembly part numbers that contain a series of subassembly parts along with some final assembly operations. A part may have anywhere from 4-10 subassembly parts, each with their own routing and materials. For this example, say there are 6 subassembly parts needed to assemble the master part. These part numbers are also added to Epicor, following a similar part numbering schema, e.g.

200-12345-a100
200-12345-a200
200-12345-a300
200-12345-a400
200-12345-a500
200-12345-a600

For the “repair and sharpen” part used in future servicing (200-12345-9000-RS), the subassembly numbers would be:

200-12345-a100-RS
200-12345-a200-RS
200-12345-a300-RS
200-12345-a400-RS
200-12345-a500-RS
200-12345-a600-RS

For the “sharpen” part used in future servicing (200-12345-9000-S), the subassembly numbers would be:

200-12345-a100-S
200-12345-a200-S
200-12345-a300-S
200-12345-a400-S
200-12345-a500-S
200-12345-a600-S

So, for this customer quote, ordering a single assembled part, we would have added 21 parts to Epicor (7 to make the new, 7 for future “repair and sharpen” service work, and 7 for future “sharpen” service work).

If the part goes out, then comes back for service within 12 months, the pricing for “repair and sharpen” or “sharpen” is used. If, however, the service work comes back > 12 months, then customer service pulls the paperwork and goes through the whole pricing matrix again with spreadsheets and price lists out of Epicor, then goes in an updates the pricing inside of Epicor, then generates the customer a quote.

My questions:

  1. How would you handle part entry for this situation?

  2. How would you handle pricing? (is it reasonable to think that we could use burden/material/labor costs in Epicor to generate customer pricing? (the reason we don’t is because our old ERP didn’t have routing capabilities and when they went to Epicor they largely kept the same internal flow)

Suggestions? I’m learning both the business methods and this area of Epicor at the same time.

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Do you know if you guys own the Embedded Configurator? The pricing rules, part creation, and method creation could all be done inside of that. It’s a lot to setup, but it would give your estimators and customer service folks a single screen in Kinetic to do all of this. Plus there wouldn’t be the passing back and forth of PDFs and Excel documents :slight_smile:

Just my two cents, but I am sure some other folks here will have other ideas!

I was wondering about a configurator, but I don’t think we have it. How would I find out? Is the “embedded” one different than another one?

You can find what you are licensed for in Company Configuration → Modules → Licenses

The Embedded Configurator is the one that is native to Kinetic, there is another configurator (CPQ) which is a separate product entirely.