Pcid

I’m looking into the PCID’s. I’m hoping someone could explain why their business uses PCID’s? Our company is thinking about using PCID’s for our pallets. A consultant recommended we look into PCID’s.

We use it for external Pallet Shipments. PCID allows us to generate a unique serial number for each pallet as picked and shipped. This conforms with a global transportation label standard.

We’re in a similar situation trying to implement PCIDs for out pallets, both internal and inbound/outbound. This is functionality that we had in a previous system, so all stock movements around the warehouse, into and out of jobs were tracked by pallet, making auditing very easy along with the ease for warehouse staff to ensure the quantities would all be correct for all moves, issues and returns.
There are a few things that are being troublesome:

  1. RECEIVNG - If you are receiving to PCID, there has to be a receipt line per pallet. With roughly 500 pallet receipts a day, this is not really feasible so we’re looking at receiving by batch and a custom workbench to split into the number of actual pallets after receipt.
  2. NONCONFORMANCE - If your stock is all in pallets, then you have to extract the items from the pallet to general stock before you can put them on non-conformance. For us, we are using nonconformance as a way of applying a status to the pallets so they can’t be allocated or used for jobs. What we really want to be able to do is to put a ‘pallet’ on hold, but this isn’t really possible so I’m having to implement a ud table for keeping track of what stock was extracted from which PCID so that taking it out of nonconformance will put it back into the pallet. I do notice that the nonconformance records do have a PCID field, but it isn’t used so may be future epicor functionality?
  3. CUSTOMIZATIONS - It seems that there are some oddities with the services for generating and manipulating the PCIDs.
    For example:
  • when putting calls to PkgControlIDBuildSplitMerge.Update in its own transaction scope, nothing gets committed to the database. For us, this makes it impossible to include with other BO methods that require the data to be in the table for processing.
  • trying to generate PCIDs using the PkgControlIDGenerator goes through without error, but it simply doesn’t generate and new PCIDs. I haven’t found a work around for this other than to just generate a bunch of PCIDs that can be used by our customizations at any time.

I’m sure there are other things, but this is all I can think of from the top of my head.
I’d love to know how you get along with this.

1 Like

I don’t think I will be of much help with the above 3 items.

We don’t receive into PCID’s (the CC and physicals don’t work with PCID); we receive to stock as normal then pick into PCID for shipment.

Our Nonconformances are addressed long before we pick for shipment, so we haven’t ad to deal with that.

We didn’t need to do any customizations for our implementation.

We are implementing Epicor also and plan to use PCID as pallet ID’s. Like Brian we plan to use this for FG inventory, sales order picking and for shipping purposes only.