OK Team. You’ve been quite helpful for me in the past. My goal is to make a dashboard that a handful of different departments use. Our inside sales team uses it for reference when talking to customers. Our planning and production teams use it to help schedule jobs and often refer to customer information to determine feasibility to expedite - giving preference to our best customers. Our sales/purchasing uses it to help with forecasting. Primarily, we want to be able to show future jobs, current jobs in WIP, and completed jobs. I am only looking for jobs for serial tracked parts. My difficulty is how I bring in “stock” jobs and “Make direct” jobs into the same view and display the relevant information - for both current and past jobs. We do about 80-90% make direct. It seems stock jobs don’t link to an order in JobProd, even though it was eventually sold on an order. I can get this by looking in the Serial Number table but this only gets my order/customer info after it’s shipped. Now, for any make direct jobs I should easily be able to refer to the order and customer info when it’s not even started or while in WIP. But linking to the order through JobProd now results in two separate order tables from two separate places. I’ve tried to use calculations to decide which table to use for a given column. That’s gotten pretty hairy. I’ve tried to use subqueries but I keep ending up with duplicate rows.
In general, is there a better way to go about what I’m trying to do? I know I can run separate queries and show them on different tabs, but I was ultimately trying to find a way to display them all on one to show the whole picture.
If you have the Customer Part Cross Reference setup, you can use that to get the Customer…
If an item is make to stock, there isn’t a simple way to tie it back to an Order. And, if you wanted to tie it to an Order, why not use Make Direct?
I had similar requirement for Make to Stock parts (actually its for a particular customer) linked to a sales order,and I stored order number and order line in JobHead table using a BPM based on due date and printed in Job Traveller. Customer orders more than 200 different parts and can’t use Make To Order as it can’t be reserved or picked in Handheld.
There are maybe 20-30 parts that we build to stock because they are quite commonly purchased. We live in a world where we serve both those who want product available on the shelf when they call but also they want us to make to order per their specs… That conflict seems to bite us in many different ways as no process seems to work well for both. Can you change a stock machine to be “make to order” after it’s already been built and put into stock? Or is that not really a thing?
Since all are make to stock parts, I stored in JobHead UD fields. You can store in JobProd UD fields so that it doesn’t cause any issue. We are using for more than 2 years. The key is part + qty + date. If the same combination exist more than once then it will be problem which I conveyed to manufacturing before I start the development.
JobProd already contains a column for OrderNum, OrderLine, OrderRelNum. Would it be a bad thing if I wrote a BPM to use those existing columns for make to stock parts whenever a stock part gets added to an order? I certainly can do some light testing first but I’m curious what the more experienced folks think about this.
Tempting as it is, not recommended. Epicor does things with fields in the background and you could unexpectedly see other behavior due to this. A recent poster used an inspection processing status field to note their inspection even though they didn’t have the QA module. They were having problems with it due to their own purposing of the field.
I am working on something similar to what you are looking into as well. We make to stock and make direct and need to see what to work on next in a better format than the priority dispatch report. My initial draft of priority dashboard is per below. I think it’d be good to make it updateable to allow more work with it, but I’m feeling a little worried how that’ll go with the need to unrelease/unengineer to make changes (e.g., allow priority scheduling code change, etc.). Assoiciate Job and Associated customer are our new fields added to JobProd table.
It sounds like you need to see the current demand. This can be all from the Order tables based on what you are saying. What data do you need besides the Order information?
Different departments use it for different things. Honestly, it’s probably one of those “our old system did it this way so we want Epicor to do it this way” kind of things. I’m changing my approach to try to push the powers that be to embrace how Epicor does it and just give views that display jobs in process, pending shipment, and shipped jobs. I’ll push those interested in viewing it from the order fulfillment side to use the sales order backlog dashboard.
Thanks for the ideas, folks. It is helpful to talk it out. I will not be forcing order info into the JobProd table for stock machines. Logistically, it doesn’t make sense since the job would be completed by the time I could do that - nevermind the potential side effects.
Since Dashboards are so easy to make, I would offer that each department get the specific needs lined up and make a dashboard for each one. A one-size-fits-all dashboard becomes a pain fast.
