Pcid & wip

Hi all,

We are currently on 2021.2. We’ve recently been experimenting with AMM but I believe it lacks some capabilities we are searching for. Our method of manufacturing uses fully indented BOMs with many levels of subassemblies.

When a lower level subassembly (child) is complete, it moves to the material request queue where it can then be processed to the next level up. We have a “sorting” process (not accounted for on the BOM) where material handlers collect all of these child subassemblies and place on pallets before they process and move them to the next location. As an example, we currently have a subassembly that contains 140 child subassemblies. When a part is complete, it moves to a staging area where it waits for the 139 other parts before it is processed to the next location.

Currently, the material handlers have to process those to the next location line by line. This is just for a single assembly, so as you can imagine, the material queue fills up quickly and adds a lot of clicks to their process.

I’d like to be able to manage this via PCID, but I’m not sure that the functionality is available. It would be great to be able to process these child parts to a PCID as soon as they come off a previous operation, then move the whole PCID to the next location without having to go line by line. I realize that they would still be processing line by line to a PCID, but it becomes less cumbersome when it’s not a full 140 items at once. Is this possible with the version we are on?

The other option I’ve explored is accounting for this process on the BOM and using a pick or sort operation as the first operation on the assembly, but it’s been shot down multiple times because picking is not a value added activity and should not be costed to a job. This would alleviate the headache completely since it would be a resource group that performs the pick operation on the parent and allows for WIP movement of that assembly. Since this has not been accepted, I am exploring all options.

Anything helps.

This functionality was added more recently, in 2024.1 I believe? But also buggy.
It works fine as long as you have 1 PCID you are utilizing to move WIP between operations, you can receive to that pcid multiple times, then issue it to the next operation in one go. but if you have multiple PCID, it issues FIFO instead of the specific PCID, so multiple pallets would end up deducting quantities from the wrong pallet. I’ve not checked to see if that was fixed yet!

So if you had two PCID’s, one for assembly A, one for assembly B, both on the same job, if you moved WIP for assembly B into a PCID it would default to A since A was created first?

Correct, per my recollection, if you received 10 different PCIDs from op 10, then went to op 20 and wanted to issue from a specific PCID, (say the 7th) it would pull from the first.