Our company is working on a continuous improvement process to document the different reasons why a part should be flagged as inactive and what actions and communications need to be done to properly make the change happen. We are concerned about the fact that a part can be marked inactive if there is no inventory and no demand, but could still be on a BOM for any number of active and approved assemblies. When we go to quote or enter an order for one of those assemblies, nothing stops the user from proceeding even though that item has an inactive part under the BOM. The only stop becomes at Job Entry when PC can’t load the job. Seems too late in the process! Quote the customer, take their order, then find out in production we can’t get all the parts. Not a great customer or employee experience.
How do you manage inactive parts when it comes to BOMs? We have a pretty complex variety of parts and don’t want to always do a mass replace and even have good reasons to not want to update all where used BOMs if we don’t have intentions of selling some models again. Is it best to try and inactivate all top level assemblies that the inactive part is including in and review them as needed? Other methods or ideas?
Good Morning Calvin!
Thank you for the reply! Yes, I would definitely be interested in seeing the dashboard you created as that was a path I was thinking of going down. Let me know some dates and times that would work best for your schedule and I will check with the parties interested on my end.
Most of the columns are self explanatory. Some that aren’t (or have conditions):
Order Count - Number of Orders were the part is on an open line
PO Count - Number of PO’s were the part is on an open line
Job Count - Number of Jobs where the part is a material and is not Issued Complete, and the Job is Open
Make Count - the number of open jobs where the part is what is being made
BOM Count - number of BOM’s where the part is a material, and the BOM Rev is Approved.
The BAQ might look complex but it’s really not. You might want to add a sub query to include the Parts references to Methods on Quotes. Limit it to ones that are marked Template.
All of this just gives you visibility to where a part is being referenced.
A more integrated solution to your problem would be a BPM fires when a Part is marked inactive, and checks for all these references. If any are found, show a message to the user and prevent the change to Inactive.
Thank you so much Calvin! This was super helpful in showing the project team. A question that came out of the demo was regarding acquiring the list of items like the Sale Order, PO, and Job numbers list that are being counted. Is that something your company does? If so, is it a report? Part of the dashboard on a different tab?
That dashboard was kind of a one time thing as a tool for when we transitioned to a new part number format. So I used it mostly to identify “old part numbers” that required action before they could be marked Inactive.
The BAQ is primarily a summary of many sub-queries. Those Sub queries could be used as the framework for BAQ’s that actually list the refrenced items (order numbers, PO Nums, etc…).
