Wow that is risky. My finance guy will have a conniption when I share this with him.
Okay. I have a much better idea of what I’m in for, and plenty of time to stock up on Pepto.
Thanks a lot for the great information. it is truly appreciated!
Yep, I see that. I doubt mine will be so “tidy”. But, we don’t have a lot of fancy GL controls, so it should be manageable. Thanks again!
@MikeGross is spot on here.
Two things to look out for:
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As Mike pointed out, you want to make sure that ALL transactions are in before starting a count (and freezing the quantities) or you will be off by the unposted transactions. A clean cutoff for cycle or physical count is paramount!
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Blank tags. If you don’t get a tag for something then it doesn’t freeze the inventory. When you complete the count, the frozen will show zero and you tag will show X. When you post, it will add X the current inventory (whatever it is) and you’ll see more than you should. This usually happens when people don’t create a tag for quantity zero but there are actually parts in stock. It’s just one of those weird gotcha’s to lookout for.
Mark W.
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Thanks @Mark_Wonsil - and your point about blank tags is very important, thanks for including that. I’ve been bitten by that one too.
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This is a great heads-up. Thanks @Mark_Wonsil.
Mark, this is something I’m going to have to see in order to understand. @MikeGross got it immediately, but I haven’t started testing yet; I’m working strictly off concepts at the moment. But now that I’m aware, I can attempt to test this.
Freezing inventory activity is going to be a problem as that is a part of our current process. The physical counting will be an interesting challenge though.
We affix labels to everything that goes into our warehouses. Our current manual process involves opening a spreadsheet and scanning each and every one of those labels (for a particular part - if we’re only counting a part); An operator scans a code into cell A1, and Excel drops to the next line awaiting the next scan. After everything is done, I run a few macros that extract the various elements from the scan (partnum, qty, lotnum, etc.)
With that manual Excel based process in mind, and having not even seen a “tag” yet, does anything come to mind in terms of tying our scanning function to Epicor’s collection of tags?
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Thanks for the April fool’s warning @ckrusen, I decided to run the recon last night. 25 thousand pages resulted! The last page (like your image of the G/L Account Recap) is the significant page, BUT… Epicor won’t attempt to post 25K pages worth of inventory adjustments to my GL, will it? The Rollup that you mentioned should trim that down significantly(??). Now I’m concerned!
(Humor, and appreciation intended, Calvin!)
Andrew, the 2D barcodes presents an interesting challenge. In the usual/normal process, the tags and sheets can have barcodes and you can modify(like we have) those both to include additional information to make it easier for the guys taking the count. They get a stack of tickets, write in the visually verified qty and return them. The data entry folks scan the part# into Count Tag Entry and enter the qty on the tag. The system does the rest of course.
Now, we should also mention that there is an epicor handheld app that will do inventory counts electronically. Search for “Epicor Handheld” here and see the various discussions on hardware. I have not checked, but I think the handheld software can now be run on any IOS/Android device as it now available via Epicor Web Access. This might be key for you if you can get the 2D barcode support to work.
Otherwise, if 2D support isn’t possible, I think you should consider using DMT (the tool for doing mass uploads via an Excel or CSV file). I think you could continue to use your spreadsheet/macro/2D scanning method - adapt your macros a bit for the required data columns for DMT - then upload that XLSX using DMT and bada-bing!
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Something to note about DMT and Count Tags: I’ve never had any luck using DMT to upload tags without DMT crashing (currently on 10.2.300.6). We ended up creating an updatable dashboard that lets us paste-insert the filled-out tag information and then save. This cut down our tag entry times from hours to minutes.
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Very interesting, Mike. Thank you. We use the Handheld module - for picking orders.
I’ll have to investigate the inventory counting options that are available.
I really appreciate the breakdown of the physical process (both from your earlier posts [re ABC codes] and now) and your thoughts on possibilities for counting. This sortof head start is exactly what I was hoping for.
I aim to find a few days to test all this out next week and, armed with all this information, it’ll be a good workout! I’ll report anything interesting back onto this topic.
Warning heeded! and, nice workaround.
Apart from this, you are using the Epicor process for full physicals and cycle counts?
Correct, we follow the process pretty closely to how Epicor sets it out for full physicals. I think cycle counts are currently done manually (individual qty adjustments), but our materials guys are planning on fully implementing the cycle count process in Epicor this year.
We stop all material transactions in Epicor and then generate and print our count sheets the morning of the count after any catch-up transactions have been entered. Then we don’t allow any transactions until all of our counts are posted back to inventory. We tried generating tags the day before, but got burned by the same issue @Mark_Wonsil pointed out, where parts moved into new bins and didn’t have tags with correct frozen inventory, so our counts ended up inflated.
We have count teams of two people count pre-defined sections of our warehouses and then reconcile in Excel spreadsheets. These are then sent to me and a couple other data-entry users who use the dashboard to upload our counts into Epicor. The trickiest part of this is making sure the tag ID numbers match up with the part/bin combinations during the upload; sometimes our counters like to sort their spreadsheets and don’t always keep the tag ID in the right spot.
Edit to expand on the blank tag problem:
If you generate tags before the count starts and before you tell everyone to stop transacting, say Tag 1 is for 10 pieces Part A in Bin B. After generating the tag but before freezing inventory, you move all of part A to bin C. Now you freeze inventory and Tag 1 saves 0 as the frozen inventory qty. The quantity in bin C doesn’t have a tag so it isn’t saving that 10 pieces on hand. During entry, you create a blank tag for the parts in bin C and enter 10. Blank tags have a “starting” quantity of zero, so when you go to post, Epicor sees:
Tag 1: 0 pieces frozen, 0 pieces counted => 0 adjustment
Tag 2 (blank): 0 pieces frozen, 10 pieces counted => +10 adjustment
Now you have your on hand quantity after you post your counts being the 10 on hand you had, plus the 10 from the quantity adjustment, so now Epicor thinks you have 20 pieces of Part A in inventory, when you really only have 10 (and you only counted 10).
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That’s a good idea. DMT has gotten a bit more flaky lately…
Oh!!! Now I get it!
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Because of the audits to our cycle count system, we don’t do a wall-to-wall physical. When we count, I dump the tags to a web app that we do the counts on (Android tablets) and then paste the counts directly into the Count Tag program.
However, this would be an ideal place to have a mobile app that uses REST to update the counts in the system. It’s on our list but not high enough to replace the current system.
Mark W.
You can do paste insert directly in Count tag entry also. That is what we do. One issue we have with Tag entry in Epicor is that it does not accept the same part and lot number combination in a bin more than once. For example we enter a tag with PartA,Bin1,LotA,qty 10 and then try to enter a tag with PartA,Bin1,LotA, qty 20. We get an error message saying the part lot number combination already exists in Bin1. This makes it unusable for us since our bins are designed to hold more than one pallet and each we have more than one pallet of the same part and lot in the same bin. So we have to do all the summarizing outside in access and excel and then paste the data from excel directly in the list view of Count Tag entry.
Vinay Kamboj
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Another pain with Tag’s is the tag number is a string, not a number. And it has leading zeros. So if you’re using an Excel file to temporarily hold the tag counts and then want to Copy & Paste into Count Entry, make sure the column in the Excel file has for the Tag Num, is formatted as “Text”, else the leading zeros get stripped off.
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That’s good to know Vinay. Fortunately, we have unique lots in bins (at present), so we shouldn’t encounter that specific problem, but it is definitely helpful to be aware of this.
Quick question, folks… we want to (live) test this process before fully ‘jumping in’. We have a manual cycle count coming up in 3 weeks and want to run it side-by-side with the Epicor process. For this limited test, I don’t believe I have to “Initialize Last Cycle Count Dates”, as I will manually select the parts to count.
The question: Can I run the “Initialize last cycle count dates” more than once? The documentation says I should not, once we start cycle counting. This makes sense to maintain the cycles and dates, but if I want to start over, can I consider this program my “Start over button”? Is there anything else I need to consider once we start “for real”?
I ask because the documentation is rather emphatic about not re-running that program.
Hello,
We went Live in Feb and are about to do a full physical.
I find the instructions confusing but would be very interested to see your “solid instructions”.
I need to get my head around it as you say 
Thanks in advance
Welcome @AGW!
Look above as there are a few documents posed by myself and others that you can download and adapt to your process. Also, do some searching on the site - as I’ve seen some other docs floating around and even recently a post on cycle counting where one of us created a whole new menu structure to put all the cycle counting menu items in one place (and since full physicals are just a subtype of cycle counting…)