This was just brought to my attention today, we are having some jobs printing the operation descriptions, where others are leaving some of the descriptions out. Not all of them, and not even the same operation sequences, or the same order. Some are just showing the seq number, the Operation ID, and then a blank area where the description should be. I tested the base SSRS report and it’s doing the same thing so I know it’s not from a modification that I made for our custom version. See below for two different jobs, omitting a description on one, but not the other.
Gotta ask, have you confirmed the operation description exists on that job / operation? If so, the next step I’d take is generating the same traveler of one of the jobs missing descriptions, and see if it generates without descriptions again. If the result is the same every time, I’d say there’s some issue with the report itself. If not, there’s something strange going on while generating the report.
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So going back to the Job’s and then the parts the Description is blank on those BOM’s… How does that happen? The OP descriptions have never been blank during use so how could a BOM been created with that description being blank? I have to assume it pulls it in from the master file when it’s added to the BOM but the fact that it can be deleted is weird to me. I also thought the report pulled the description from the master file, but apparently it does not.
Now to figure out how to re-populate those description fields without having to touch every BOM.
wow… this problem is HUGE… only checking approved revisions and I have over 10000 records with blank descriptions.
Ooof. Well the best way to get those descriptions back will probably be DMT. That’s only going to fix existing records, though. Need to nail down the reason for it. Are the operations and materials pulled directly from the Part Rev?
For jobs yes, they are pulled from the part rev. That’s actually what I’m talking about as far as having over 10000 records of blank descriptions. I just went straight to the part rev BOM’s to see if they were blank there and they are. I don’t care about open jobs, I’ll let those die off since we turn them over pretty quickly, I’m more interested in fixing the approved part rev’s that don’t have a description there.
I could use the DMT but that requires editing EVERY revision for every operation that has this problem… I reached out to Epicor to see if there was some sort of a fix that they could write that would populate those fields based off the current operation description in the master file without going through the engineering workbench… Now if they just understand what I’m asking for… that will be the start of it.
The only job fixes that I would need to do would be to ones that are used as templates, but we don’t do that on many at all.
If you were wondering… I have 20,534 operations on approved revisions that have no description entered…
Epicor told me this…
1. Identify all RevisionNum on the PartOpr table with empty OpDesc and check out the affected revisions in Eng Workbench. Look at the operations one by one and for the empty ones select a different operation from the dropdown, save and return to the original. After this you will see a Description. Approve the Revision and Check in. This should be done for all affected revisions.
2. Review if a DMT update can be done to massively populate this field for the affected revision, if you are not familiar with this tool and require further assistance, a new ticket case should be created addressed to our Technical Support Team as they are the group that handles DMT, they will be able to confirm if this approach is possible or not.
I have to imagine the amount of records that will be created from an audit trail using the DMT to fix these BOM’s would be insane… So I asked them again if they can create something to fix this without utilizing the engineering workbench method.
The DMT approach would also take 2.5hr’s to complete. That’s assuming it will run at the 135ish RPM that I saw on a recent edit I did of 81 BOM’s.
Not sure if this is related, but we had all kinds of problems with the JobOper.OpDesc when we did a recent upgrade from an earlier version of Vantage. It wasn’t the same issue you had, with blank values. Not sure if you had an upgrade in there somewhere, but that might also be something to consider.
Our issue, in case you care, I think the version they came from (Vantage 6) didn’t have the OpDesc on the JobOper (or PartOpr), it just used the OpMaster.OpDesc field. At some point between V6 and Kinetic, Epicor added a copy of the description to JobOper/PartOpr, it defaults to OpMaster.OpDesc. This should allow you to default to the operation description but you can modify it on a part by part/job by job basis. When we had our data come over, all the JobOper.OpDesc was not set to the OpMaster.OpDesc value, but it was the resource group description. So, any existing jobs brought over had the resource description printing on the traveler, and any new jobs had the operation description the traveler. Had to do a mass update of those.
We skipped upgrading from Vantage to 10 and we did a dump and load. I’m assuming since the part BOM’s, as you’re describing, didn’t have that field for the description from Vantage, that may be why they didn’t get imported into 10? But that was back in 2013 and I can’t believe that people haven’t noticed this till now… Also if that was what caused this then every operation description would have been blank in 2013 and they would have slowly started to populate as the years went on and changes were made to the BOMs. At this point I guess anything is possible, and with the lack of true use of the system I’m not surprised it went unnoticed.
I’m doing a test run in our training DB now to see what this will do as far as time frame, and size of the DB due to all of the audit entries having to be made for 20,000+ BOM changes.
Epicor also told me to go pound sand when I told them the level of this issue… basically said the software didn’t cause this glitch, you did, because I can’t find any notes of anyone having this problem in the past… So you have to fix it on your own with the DMT or some other SQL method if possible, but that would require a consultant to find that solution.