The material demand doesn’t get updated when you report a scrap quantity in production. I’m thinking there must be a solution for this but we haven’t been able to find it and epicor support has only told us, working as designed.
In the job, report a production quantity and a scrap quantity. For example, operation required quantity is 84. Report that 80 were completed and 4 were scrapped on that operation. Make sure not to click operation complete.
Operation in job tracker correctly displays that only 80 out of 84 were completed, however when reviewing time phase inquiry for the materials required for that operation, none of them show any outstanding demand, even though it is obvious we need to make 4 more.
I’ve tried setting “Recalculate Expected Yield” in the operation master. I’ve tried backflusing and not backflushing the materials. I don’t know what else to try. We need the material demand to show up for the outstanding quantity. We do not have any quality modules.
You will never get the system to do what you want without a customization. Epicor is correct that it is working as designed because there is no general business standard for what you are asking about.
Think about all the various ways a business can handle scrap on a job.
Company A wants scrapped material to add demand back to the existing job and have the needed material reissued.
Customer B does not want material demand created because they will create another job to handle the scrap quantity.
Customer C does not want either to happen, they want the job split for the scrap quantity and with the new job they will try to rework the scrapped parts.
Etc…
There are just too many possible situations for what a company wants to happen that the easiest (and best) way to handle it is the way the system is programmed.
I’m not opposed to a custom solution, but I’m not sure where to start. I don’t believe I can modify the way time phase works. Then I was thinking about an updateable dashboard that would pull in materials where scrap was reported on the operation and . . . do something with them? Just looking for ideas on how other people deal with this, whether by process change, customization, or anything else.
I have always dealt with this problem by telling the business to build a process outside of the system that handles it. I provide reports, dashboards, alerts, etc and they use those tools to identify the jobs to address and manually do what they want.
If you want specifics for your situation, this is what I would recommend.
I would turn on the shop warning #130 Excess scrap has been reported. Show the applicable employees how to monitor the warnings so that when they see that scrap has been reported, they can issue additional material to the job to keep it going.
Ok the problem is that many of the materials are purchase direct, so if we use all the material we purchased, we need a PO suggestion generated to buy more materials to make more (to make up for the material that was used on the parts that got scrapped). Even if we send an email alert that it happened, that doesn’t create a PO suggestion, and we can’t just issue more material to the job (because we don’t have any).
Then I would have the alert go to whoever creates jobs and have them create a new job for the scrapped quantity. Then that will add new demand to the system and prompt purchasing to buy the parts. Just close the original job short.
So when an item gets scrapped, the entire parent part number is scrapped, and you need to (in essence) increase production by whatever the scrapped quantity is?
So you need to either increase the production quantity of this job by the scrap quantity, OR create an additional job for the scrap quantity. Which of those would you rather do?
Take a job with 2 operations. Total job prod qty = 84. Qty per parent for both ops is 1 for simplicity.
On op 10, they produce 80 and scrap 4. So now they need to make 4 more on op 10 (and thus require the additional materials to make 4 more).
They haven’t started op 20 yet, so op 20 doesn’t require any extra materials beyond the original estimate.
Increasing the overall job prod qty doesn’t fix the problem, because now we are just going to produce too many without solving the problem of the additional materials that are required for op 10.
That’s what I’m trying to get to… is EXACTLY what you want to have happen.
Do all of your materials (PartMtl records) have a RelatedOperation value? If so, we can (relatively) easily figure out what materials will have been consumed… but no way to know WHICH ones if multiple materials are related to Op 10.
How can we know WHICH materials related to an operation are the ones that are scrapped and need to be replaced?
It would be all of them - in general what is happening is we are welding something. At the end, some of the pieces fail, so the whole thing is scrapped (including all the materials that were welded).
And then do you only have single-level MOMs or are there subassemblies that we may or may not have to consider? Are there subcontract operations that may already have happened that we will also need to repeat?
And then does this happen again at subsequent operations, so at any given operation level we may need to be adding more materials?
My goal here is to get you thinking about all the steps you’ll need to take to automate this… and it looks like it would be a (ahem) significant undertaking. At this point it might be easier to work off of @jkane’s suggestion and just:
when a scrap value is entered in a LaborDtl record, send an email to the Planning crew
write a custom routine that adds all materials used in the previous operations to that email so they know what to buy.
NONE of this is out of the box. I’ve never done anything like this… but if anyone else reading this has PLEASE feel free to jump in!
Ernie, thanks for taking the time to walk through this AND share your years of experience helping many many companies out with their unique manufacturing processes.
It means a lot when you say, “I have never done anything like this or seen anything like this.” It’s always a moment where I pause and think, am I going down a bad road. Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes the answer is unknown. Either way, it’s always helpful and always helps me reflect.