Rick,
You guys are not alone in this. I would love to see a hybrid that allows buying to inventory, and mass-issuing the received material to a job.
Upper Management is so unhappy over this and a few other Epicor shortcomings that they are contemplating alternate options.
Paul
This is something that you could make a customization for. I did a mass report operations screen built on a dashboard. You could do the same thing for mass issue.
We are working on a customization now that would receive and issue in one transaction. We think it will pay for itself in about 6 months with the reduced labor at Receiving/Stockroom locations.
Ignorance questions!
(sorry)
How does purchasing know how much to purchase for these yet to be engineered jobs?
What is receiving doing about overages?
Is there some sort of Inventory clearing process or something to make sure nothing is missed?
I am interested in this as well; it might be a good idea to roll this in with your purchasing to contract notes and make it into a sticky. I am seeing this as the best solution to our (and quite a few otherās) struggle with using purchasing to inventory but really liking to receive and issue to job while keeping costing data.
When the parts are added to the bill of material, MRP runs and sees the demand and then creates a purchasing suggestion. We do not typically get overages, as most of these parts are one offs. When the parts are received, they are placed into inventory if the demand Job is not released. In that case, when the Job is firmed and released, the parts are issued to the Job using the Mass Issue screen.
As a standard procedure, our Receivers run a Time Phase inquiry on every part that is received to determine if there is an open Job demand for the part. If the Job the part is required for has been released, Receiving will do all of the transactions manually, at the time of receipt, to receive the part and issue it to the correct Job. Itās kind of clunky and not fast, but it is the best we can do until we get the customization to work.
We only buy the stuff before hand that we know are odd items with long lead times. (the engineers communicate that to purchasing) The rest of it comes through the suggestions when the job is built and scheduled. The nice thing about this process is, you can order some stuff ahead of time, then whatever you didnāt order ahead of time comes through on a suggestion. If you missed something, it will still be caught because a suggestions will be made.
When the job is complete, I have a BAQ that checks when everything connected to a contract (jobs, order lines, POās) is closed. When a contract shows up on the list, I review the contract and the bin. Anything leftover gets dispositioned into general inventory or returned. Thatās the really nice thing about using contract bins, is itās just in inventory. If you issue to the job, that makes transactions on the job which starts locking things down. (ex if there is a material in an assembly that ended up not being needed, but the material was issued on the job, then returned, you canāt delete that assembly from the job anymore. You can make the materials require 0, but you canāt make the asm require 0, so now packing lists and other things are messy). So if you have a contract bin, you have a way to allocate it, without issuing to it until you actually need it. It gives you more flexibility.
Brandon; are you using just the Link to Contract flag on the Part Detail tab, or are you setting this up on the site tab? I am not sure if you are multi site; we are and it might make sense to us to use this distinction.
I am moving forward with formal testing beyond the little POC I did a few days ago. I have combined your notes from the various posts and will use this as a starting point for developing our own method. Wish me luck!
We are single site, so they are synced between the two tabs. Multi site would definitely add some complexity.
We buy everything that is non-stock (which is most purchased components since we are engineer to order) to the contract bin. I have BPMās in place so any non-stock purchased part is link to contract.
I hope you can get it working. It seems like this is a little used feature and I would love to have some others that use it so we can talk about ways to make it work better.
I would be interested in your BPMās and repurpose them. Multi site brings on daily complexities here, so whatever I do in a BPM I have to make work for both sites. This is a challenge since there are cultural differences between the two.
I will share my notes as well. The more people can benefit from early adopters, the better.
When I get a chance, I can upload them, although we have a lot of business specific stuff that would be useless to you. There isnāt any code in them either, so they are relatively basic.
Brandon,
Have you noticed that Planning Contract Searches donāt always find the Planning Contract even though it is there and active?
Paul
Weekend was too long; the Planning Contract needs to be āActiveā AND āApprovedā for it to show up as a filter option in reports.
Brandon,
Are you using the Default Planning Contract at the Project Level? I am trying to link an existing project with Planning Contracts. The Project was tied to an order and had empty jobs created to it to satisfy the demand. I have severed the links and have created the Contract Bins , but I can no longer link the jobs back to the order. The error I am getting is that the Project is tied to a different Planning Contract. When I check the Project the Default Planning Contract is grayed out thoughā¦
Just wondering if you have seen this?
We are not using projects, so we havenāt done that.
For the jobs and the links, remove the demand link from the job, then set the contract, then re-add the demand link. The order needs to have the same contract linked to it as well or you get that error.
I have already had arguments with service about the circular reasoning problem when you are trying to add a contract after the fact. They donāt seem interested in fixing that basically because they see it like you should have everything set up before you make the job. So when you make the order you link it to a contract, then you make the job. If you do it in that order, the job will automatically have the contract linked. Thatās why I did that customization to make the contract with a button on the order entry screen.
I imagine with the project, you will need to have the project, order, and jobs all connected to the same contract.
Correctā¦ It all seems to come down to the Project having the same contract, but for some reason it is grayed out. If I set up a new Project I can set a contract without issues. Problem is that we have already milestone billed against the current projectā¦
Thatās a raw deal. Iām guessing that you will have to let your current projects finish as you are using them now and transition to the planning contracts as you go.
Did you say that you removed the link from the jobs to the project though? I seem to remember jobs not wanting to give that link up when I messed around with projects, but Iām not sure Iām remembering correctly. (edit, nope, seems to work fine)
Are you trying to get away from projects altogether? or are you still going to use them?
with a quick test, the contract get grayed out if there is a job connected, but as soon as I remove that connection, it opens up again. Did you remove all job links to the project? (not demand links, the project ID in the job)
Support is confirming that as well, yet it is not working like that for me, even in developer mode, base only. Projects are important to use, so we have to keep those. It would be a show stopper if I canāt connect a job with a planning contract. Also; it seems that the Project screen only allows for a single default planning contract. The jobs validate their planning contract back to the project. How can I have multiple jobs, each with a unique planning contract validate that to a project that can only have a default planning contract?
I have no problems with having the Project being unaware of anything Planning Contract related down the road, but it seems that Epicor insists on linking the two.
Ouch, thatās a bummer. And I donāt see you being able to change their mind either. They are going to see it as how itās designed. Their intention, clearly, is to use one contract with the whole project. Iāve been trying to get them to change the move inventory screen so that a quantity shows up in a contract bin after you select it. Their response was āyou arenāt supposed to use that screen for contract binsā to which I asked the question āhow should I manage those bins then?ā to which they responded āhire a consultantā. 
I hope you can have better luck getting through to them than I did. If you need projects, it sounds like this will be a deal breaker for you. And Iām pretty sure that those rules are incredibly hard to subvert (usually for good reason). Bummer.