Hello, I am curious to hear from anyone who is segmenting their parts…particularly for the aerospace industry. We have utilized different part numbers altogether in the past, but i am wondering if there is something more robust/different that I am missing in Epicor. We do have our parts sub-categorized by: Group & Class and do realize there is a Lot option as well. The question arose as to whether we can have a part # for a non-aerospace part as well as an aerospace without changing the part number. I do realize that we can (cost more) use an aerospace part for a non-aerospace, but not the other way around.
We are starting to get more aerospace defined and going forward I’m looking for best practice. If I have to create one, that’s fine, but wanting feedback. I guess you could say it that way, which way it was sold, but more importantly if I have them differentiated already then I should already know that. I’m attempting to start at the beginning with the whole process. Good point, revision methods can be different.
From a quality perspective, you can sell that part and track it through
either:
Product Group it was sold under (you can change this at the time of the
sales order)
Customer Group of the customer it was sold to (customer setup - group code
= Aerospace)
You can use your internal part and use the customer part number when you
sell it to an Aerospace customer
As Kimberly mentioned, you can use the Header/ASM analysis code. This means
that for each Job produced, Epicor will auto fill in the Header Analysis
code (from part maintenance) so you can see the “mix” of jobs on the floor
at anytime or, historically, the grouping of jobs you produced based on
that analysis code (See below for example of a job where either the Product
Group and/or Header Analysis code can populate with “Aerospace”
The bigger concern is auditabiltiy. If you have 2 pieces in stock, and one can be sold to an aerospace customer and the other cannot, how do you know which is which, in the system? At cycle count or physical inventory, how do you know which is not there? Aerospace is notoriously painstaking on it’s audit requirements. That’s where things like lot tracking really help. You can give the lot a description that shows it’s aerospace capable or not… However, because description is set by people, and part number is a system designated value, most people segregate part numbers, to keep the audit trail clean (no typos or errors).
Great points, speaking with our Quality Director, trace-ability is the number one concern. By creating a different part number, whether it is a pre-fix designation or a total different part number it must be traceable. I have to let this sink in for a while and experiment. Thanks.
As Leann pointed out, it depends on what you are trying to do
If you simply want to know if that part is being sold into aerospace versus
non aerospace for sales analysis then use product group and/or customer
group
If the part has different revisions/methods when sold to one customer
versus another then in essence it may as well be a different part number as
the usage/cost is different for different customers. You may also find the
quality traceability is more difficult when it comes to non conformance
analysis, RMA’s etc
