Does anyone know why Epicor went down the route of not allowing users to add a lot number to a finished good item at the time of manufacturing? It seems like this is a fairly standard practice for anyone who works in a regulated business and has stringent quality control requirements. We are required to trace back all components used in the manufacturing of a finished good back to each raw material, the time the material was used and the location the material was used and all subsequent locations that finished product moved after manufacturing. By only allowing a lot number to be added at the time of shipping creates an issue.
I have read through multiple posts on this and haven’t found a suitable option that meets all of our business requirements so trying to get some insight from this community. Thanks in advance for any thoughts you have!
@beidahl Welcome. Make direct does not exist until the shipment, so that is where it gets made. We also have to have lot traceability and auto receiving to inventory makes the lot number from manufacturing and the we ship that lot.
There is a new EU directive that requires any time a material is converted that a lot gets assigned. That lot is required to identify the raw materials of the lot that came in, the time of the manufacturing, the location of the manufacturing, who was the operator, etc.. In reality they don’t require a “lot”, just the ability to have full traceability of the finished good. The only way I know to do that is to assign a lot number that is tied to the manufacturing order. Open to any suggestions on another way to do it in the system. Other MES systems I have built and designed in the past have this option, including the 30 year old system we are replacing with Epicor, so it is just odd Epicor doesn’t.
Not sure if this helps as my company is a fully Make-to-Stock facility. But, for us, the job number is the lot number for manufactured finished goods. All material issued to the job should already be lot controlled as a lot number gets assigned when material is received into inventory. This provides us with full traceability.
Thanks Matthew- The job number for us doesn’t work because we make multiple units on the same job and each unit ultimately needs to get assigned a unique “lot” number. SO we are using the lot number sequence as the job and then the unit number on the job. SO example will be 1000-1, 1000-2, 1000-3, etc… From there I can track the attributes stored with the job through a modification we made that will log each unit’s time of manufacture, operator and other pieces of information we need to have. I have been exploring using the package control ID and serial number option but each of those has a draw back. The best current solution is for us to use the lot functionality on non-stock parts.
We do aerospace. Traceability is a foundational requirement here. A finished part that can’t be traced is a paperweight, not a sellable good. We make paperwork, machining is our side business, etc.
Still, even then there are levels to things. Not every component we make is serialized. You still have to maintain integrity, starting with the job inputs.
Don’t use multiple lots of a material within 1 job. Nothing but dragons and late night drinking lie in the world of mixed lots.
If a series of parts aren’t made together simultaneously, or at least in contiguous sequence, it (at minimum) gets its own lot. It potentially gets split into a separate job if there’s enough time separation that a machine will run a separate job in the meantime. Each receipt to stock from each job generally gets its own auto-generated lot#.
That level covers most of our parts. If you need more than that, like which operator touched which piece, then you need serialization.
Side note: we do very, very few direct jobs. Even though everyone here thinks in terms of direct jobs, in practice we are moving to stock between jobs and stocked pieces will sit on the shelf for varying times as the higher assembly jobs work their way through. This reflects the actual movement of inventory better, though I’ve had to build a modest number of customizations to help traceability.
In Epicor, Lot Tracking is an “inventory” function (designed for multiple piece groupings), and is only added during “inventory” transactions (receipt to stock, shipment, movement from bin to bin). There is no ability in Epicor for “lot” transactions within WIP.
Serial Number Tracking is for individual part numbers, can be used within WIP, and can be “matched” to serialized components (but there is no direct mapping to lot tracked components).
There’s an Epicor Idea to introduce functionality to create a lot number at the time of report quantity. I was hopeful that it would include functionality for make direct parts. It looks like it’s in development with an anticipated release of 2025.2
We track all materials to a job and then use sscc numbers and a timestamp datamatrix generated from BarTender to label each case of product. It works pretty well. I had to add a UD field for tracking info at time of shipping because the Epicor PCID functions are not intuitive enough for our company.