Industrial Equipment History Tracking

Kinetic ERP
1

I am wondering if anyone has come up with a slick way to track industrial equipment that you sell. We manufacture really large industrial equipment that can be in service for decades. In addition to the sale, I would like to create a way to track any spares orders and any maintenance.

Each machine we sell gets a SN assigned. After the sale, we can get multiple spares orders and the occasional field service request. I wish there was a way to tie orders to an existing SN, but am not looking to go down that route myself (although, now I am going to put in an idea for that). My initial thought is to use the Case module with parent/child cases. It should work, but would be interested in learning what others may have done.

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2

Actually sounds like you could use Projects for gathering these things.

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3

:thinking:

That crossed my mind too, but am not that familiar with the linking that would do. Can you link Projects to Projects?

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Initially I was thinking that your project ID would be the machinery SN (or it could be in another/UD field) and you could use it to ‘collect’ the other transactions like we do. Each of these transactions has a Project ID field.

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We don’t fully use the module like Epicor intended, but it’s working for what we need.

Also - don’t see a way to link projects to other projects.

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Oh, so you create a project and leave it open (can you add to the project if it is closed?) and then whenever there is a transaction against the SN, you link it to the project. :thinking:

Interesting solution! I’m going to have to think on that. Especially since I was hoping to use Projects as…Projects. :laughing:

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yep. And you can still use projects as Projects - but the mix might make reporting a bit dodgy in so much as you’ll potentially have to exclude the machinery projects form any sort of summary reporting.

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Or Case Management

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Yes, that was my initial thought too. But how do you track to the top level part and SN when you are sending them lower level components?

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You could use a linked case/parent case

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I forgot that Case had SN field. I just didn’t think it would work because you mentioned future orders (Plural) and a Case is really a 1-to-1 relationship. It does link to other transactions, but not like the more generic Project hierarchy.

I guess that’s the only two real differences when re-tasking these two elements for your purpose - (1)do you need >1 order/invoice/job? and (2) how easy will it be to regurgitate the data (summary reporting) in some useful form?

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11

I agree you can add a WBS Phase and New job

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12

@MikeGross & @Hally , you guys are really making me think today. I’m going to have to stew on this for a while.

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This was a customization I had thought to build as well, but never got around to it. I assumed I’d have to use a UD Table using the SN as one of the keys and any OrderNum and/or JobNum as secondary keys to link things together.

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And the standard Field Service module is not an option?

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Correct. At least, not at this time.

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16

It looks like you can create all of the links in a case that you want using the External Links. Not sure if that would be better than parent/child cases. I’ll have to play around.

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