We would like to consider lot control on some of our parts. However, based on what we are seeing, it appears that using lot control is an extremely manual system (our shipping folks would have to manually select a lot each time). Is there an easy way to:
Seems like this process should not be so manual.
Any thoughts?
Sam,
While many companies need to have Lot control, how they need it to work differs. In many cases which lot that is picked doesn’t matter, but needing to know which lot a customer rec’d is critical.
With most of my clients the Lot number is printed on the product label so it can be scanned.
Actually the same client has two different lot number picking requirements in the same warehouse.
When Fulfilling customer orders the lot selected does not matter, so the pickers just scan the lot on the label. However, when picking raw materials, the oldest lot needed to be picked first.
Epicor provides different ways to address the various customer needs.
For instance, the Fulfillment Workbench can be used by Customer Service to allocate certain lots to certain sales order lines. (In Order Entry > Actions > Reserve\Allocate). Then when the Material Queue is printed the picker will be directed to that Lot number.
Another option is to use a BPM to direct the picker to the oldest lot. This was done for a client for inventory transfers from their raw materials warehouse to the production warehouse. In this case they did not opt to use the material queue but instead we created a BPM that when they entered the part number in the handheld Move Inventory screen the BPM looked up the oldest lot for the part and set the form’s Qty, From Bin & Lot number. This has worked very well for them.
I’m sure you could do something similar depending on your picking method in your shipping department.
-Rick
www.getaligned.solutions
You can absolutely do what you are asking although it requires customization.
Essentially, you could write a baq (or use adapters) to show lots by pn\bin. You would call that in a customization passing your selected pn\bin and run some logic on the results to determine the oldest (maybe finding the part tran with the oldest date with that lot - actually it seems like there is a created date attached to lots you can use)
You grab the result you want and then auto populate the field.