We are going to start locking down who is allowed to access our warehouse and are going to force staff to use Move Inventory Request to ask the warehouse crew to move Inventory around (no more text messages, emails, notes, or spoken requests).
That brings us to a question… when there’s a Part stored in that warehouse that we use in-house (for example a container for hazardous waste), how does someone request that be brought out of the warehouse. Currently staff that needs such a Part goes to the warehouse and gets the Part and then, in Kinetic, does an Issue Miscellaneous Material. Move Inventory Request would prompt the warehouse crew to move (STK-STK) the Part from one bin to another. But in the case of in-house use Parts, they aren’t going to a bin.
I think this sounds like a great “Idea”, and should be relatively easy for Epicor to build.
They just need to mimic the Move Inventory Request functionality but instead of the “To Warehouse” and “To Bin” fields, they could provide a reason code field (same requirement as issue misc. which I think basically treats it like an inventory adjustment)… OR… potentially, if you have AMM and Production Floor Locations set up as Bins, the Issue Misc. Request could stipulate the floor location you’re asking them to bring it to. (Right now you can’t choose a resource in/out bin in Move Inventory Request).
In the meantime, I’m wondering if you could use the “Move Inventory Request”, but set up a new bin called “Misc. Issue” or something of that ilk.
Your users could still enter a request… add a comment in the “Reference” field on where/why/when… and then use that special bin as the “To” location.
Someone from your warehouse team would monitor the “requests” as normal, but any requests for material movements to that bin would need to be processes through Issue Misc. Mat’l instead of a bin-to-bin transfer.
Extra steps, but at least it would be a way of using an existing request queue.
I was trying to imagine this without a two-step process and I just can’t think of a way around it. You’d need the STK-STK to pick/move it to the usage bin (maybe create one called INHOUSE) and then do the Issue Miscellaneous from there? Seems to insure that you’d have an audit trail of all the movements…
Well, there’s no reason to actually PERFORM the STK-STK… just request one.
The Warehouse staff, would look for the specific Bin in the STK-STK request queue and perform a STK-UNK transaction instead… and then, I guess, delete/deny the initial STK-STK request?
So, only one resulting transaction. Not ideal as you’d have to hop back-and-forth between forms… but its a work around, I suppose.
Oopsy… I was looking at the wrong screen. Move Inventory Request doesn’t have a “reference” field. That was on the Issue Misc. Material form. So… I guess this method may require adding a UD Column so you could track “where/why/when” type details for the requested move. Not sure what table that would need added to, since the fields in Move Inventory Request are bound to MoveRequest, which isn’t an actual DB table.
Because they are things like a container for hazardous waste. We buy the container, but it’s not used as a component on a job, or sold to a customer. We fill it as we make product. It’s like a garbage can.
So if you are trying to issue to msc, I think you would have to do a regular move request stk-stk to get the forklift driver to bring it over, then someone, either the worker, or the forklift driver, needs to do the issue misc material transaction to issue it.
It’s annoying that’s it’s 2 transactions instead of rolled up into one like a Stk-Mtl transaction, but that’s probably the best way to do it.
I would propose though that if you are actually using it up, just issue it to the job that you are doing at the time. Yeah it might not be 100% fair that one job gets the cost, and another doesn’t if it’s something used across multiple jobs, but it at least puts the cost into COGS where it probably shoud be.
But I’m sure that’s an accounting decision you don’t get to make.
I sense an Idea for today’s Frideas thread