Hello,
I have had an issue with epicor that I can’t seem to figure out solid logic for. The company that I work for creates rolls of X material. This material can have adhesive on it, get cut down to a certain width, get stamped or cut so we get sheets of material, get spliced back together, get cut to a certain length. There seems like there are infinite combinations and I have had many people give me potential solutions but none of them reflect the work employees are actually doing. This issue is preventing me from being able to create BOMs that are always accurate and reflect the amount of material the warehouse employees need to use.
Here is an example. Lets say we are creating a finished good part with a Length of 200Ft, a Width of 25 FT, using a 2 inch thick core with a core diameter of 5 in.
(Amazing drawing, I know
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now here comes the dilemma, in our system I would like to have the option to apply the same adhesive to the roll, laminate it with the same lamination, and apply a green color for the finished good product. However I would like to be able to do so while changing my width from anything between 10ft wide to 35 ft wide as we can cut it down to anything in between, and I would like to be able to run anything between 200Ft of material to 5000Ft of material, depending on what the customer ordered.
Our current solution: Set the finished good roll UOM to whatever (honestly it doesnt really matter but it should typically be rolls) and create a BOM for this part based on previous jobs, not following a particular plan. Ensure the part is lot tracked and enter the width and length fields in a customization that is saved under the lot. Store the item in stock, and when we need to use a specific kind of material use the lot tracker and have our schedulers determine what the best possible material that we can use for a job. Basically the amount we are using is changing per each job as the schedulers get the jobs.
What this has caused: Chaos! People tend to forget where certain lots are located and they dont always use the oldest role for the job since the system isnt recommending the best material to use. Purchasing doesn’t know how much stock quantity we need, no automation can be setup with jobs since they have to be manually edited every single time one is made, costing is a mess because we cant determine how much each roll costs since the cost of the roll changes based on data in a UD field that the system doesnt interact with, price lists are impossible to create. TLDR the system barely works for the company because we cant represent our finished goods parts in BOMs accurately.
We need a better way. The only thing I can realistically think of that solves this is to have a million different parts created for each length and width. I am spit balling with creating 3 different widths and putting our parts into the 3 width categories and we can kind of make BOMs with that as the logic, but that leaves the length variable to still be unrepresentable within epicor. I see there is a width and length value I can enter in part entry, but this is part specific, and I need each batch (or another way to think of it would be Lot or each different physical roll) to have its own different width and length. If we change the UOM to be length like Ft I can have the length issue resolved, and I would have to lot track each roll, but then that would force sales to enter in a new line for each roll in an order, and some orders come out to be 50 rolls + so this doesnt really make sense for data entry either. I feel like I can’t find a descent solution to what seems like such a simple issue. Any warehouse geniuses that have any suggestions let me know!
