I would like to hear from you a recommendation and experience to manage cable it in the inventory.
We create a Part and we receive it in inventory. It is a purchased part. We defined a specification for that cable for example:
Description: CABLE 600/100v
The Inventory UOM is FT.
we receive 100 ft and we put it in our warehouse.
Then, we create a job and we Issue that material to the Job. In the job, they use 50 FT and the 50FT are returned back to the warehouse.
Now, we have 50ft in the warehouse.
We receive a second purchase of the material: 100 FT of the same type cable and we receive it into the warehouse. Now, we have 150ft.
That is correct, we have 150ft, but If we need to use it, we have one cable of 50ft and other of 100ft and if I need 120ft, none of them will help me because both are less than the size we need.
How do you recommend to manage this material? how is this kind of material managed with customers in the cable industry?
Must we create a different part for every receiving?
Should we create a review for every receiving?
The review should be created based on the length of the cable?
@ggrimaldo - you do not mention if you lot track the cable or not, so I’ll go with ‘not’. @bordway and @josecgomez’s suggestions are totally valid, but I have to ask - can you splice the 100ft and 20ft (of the 50ft) together? or must you only use a 120ft piece?
If you cannot splice the cable, then tracking multiple dimensions could work, but so could Lot tracking. If you have to know if you have a 120ft piece in inventory, then Lot tracking’s additional overhead is so small compared to the benefit. My last company lot tracked 10k+ lots at a time, because the individual piece counts of each lot where so important - and it really made it nice. And since you (I assume) already re-tag each bundle of wire with it’s length, you’re practically lot tracking already.
If you can splice the cable, just run the inventory as total on-hand qty. Our raw material is round wire (of various gauges) that comes on spools - think big spools of single conductor wire. (We do not lot track either, although we mark each spool with the mfg’s ‘heat’ number for tracking and QA purposes - so it’s almost lot tracking) We weigh them during receiving to make sure we got what we ordered, and put that weight in inventory as a weight class UOM of pounds. We issue a spool to a job, use some, and then weight it, and return that weight to inventory. As you can see, we will have any number of partial spools of any given part# in inventory at a given time, but inventory shows the total weight as ‘on hand’ for that part#. Another job comes along and requires a weight that is more than any one spool available, we just issue spools and splice wire until we use what we need for that job.
do you have any idea how many different lengths you need for your jobs?
and the number/frequency of jobs?
the cable is stored in one location, near the workcenter(s) for all the jobs?
Reason I ask, at one site, all the jobs were in the same resource group/location and all the “length” inventory was stored nearby. And the frequency of jobs was low enough that one “guy” was responsible for verifying if they had enough “pieces” for the next weeks jobs, and order more if necessary.
I’m guessing you may have hundreds of pieces all different lengths and this may not work but have you looked at the “Track Multiple UOM’s” option on the part? We use this for sheets of steel. I may have 10 4’X8’ sheets and if I cut them all in 1/2 I now have 20 4’X4’ sheets and using the UOM split and merge program I am able to manage how many pieces of each size I have. The catch is you would need a UOM for each possible length in your UOM class.
We are still in the version 10.2.6.x, but I’ll analyze the solution with the 10.2.700.
I am going to test the Lot Tracking.
Read about the Tracking Inventory in Multiple Units of Measure, 10.2.700, Epicor10_UOMPrinciplesSetup_102700.pdf, page 10.
Analyze separating the lengths by part numbers or by bin.
You can have a bin labeled 100ft, 50ft etc., so when they return material back to stock that they are selecting the correct length by the bin label.
Only 100’ lengths would go into the 100ft bin, that way if you see 500ft, you know that you have 5 > 100’ lengths.