Long story Short we have large orders (blanket orders) with several releases a year sometimes several releases a month we ship by pallet (PCID) and when we go to ship an individual release it is an absolute ordeal.
You can’t just walk up to Customer Shipment Entry and add a PCID to a specific Order Line / Rel
You can either go through the lovely fulfilment workbench process, material queue pick pack and ship process. Which requires no less than 4 screens and the sacrifice of a virgin lamb…
Or you can try to use Pack Out which lets you quickly scan a PCID to ship. However this process is deeply flawed since it automatically picks the Line / Release that it wants to ship without giving you a choice (even if the Order Line / Releases UNFIRMED)
So if we have a sales order Line 1 / Release 1 (Unfirmed) with a quantity of 100 pallets Pack Out (and the same line also has 10 other releases with Ship Dates and Need by Dates Firmed) it will ALWAYS automatically ship Line 1 / Release 1 when we scan in a PCID and it will not allow us to change which Order Line / Release it is. This is a giant problem for us since like I said we have giant blanket orders with tens or hundreds of individual releases we manage for a whole year or two.
We cannot be the only customers who have blanket orders, shipping is a nightmare this way. We should be able to scan a PCID and select the individual Order / Line / Release we put it on.
Seriously I’m writing an Epicor function to do this and so far… its not going well.
Having to do fulfilment workbench and material queue and pack out it has been a nightmare!
We do the whole thing, but we do not do blanket orders. We do collect some orders during the week and ship on the same day. They constantly add to the PCIDs and then use that ID for the packout. We redesigned our process to work with the FWB though, so if you’re not using it now I could understand your issue.
Plus using the FWB allows us to do Cross Docking which is extremely helpful.
Yes, we do not use allocate though, we reserve/release.
We do follow the steps as close to 1:1 with what we do physically as we can get, it isn’t someone just going through all the motions in Epicor after the fact.
We have people who reserve/release, people who manage and assign the created material move requests, and pickers who process the requests. They pick into a shipping crate with it’s own PCID, and can generate a new PCID on demand when they need to start a new crate. When a crate is full it gets sent to shipping for pack/ship.
e: Seconding what Doug said, we did modify our process to fit on FWBs rails but it was well worth it.
Got ya
In our case (in this case) is just one big batch of the same material and we need to have specific pcids (age is important) ship out at the right time
So we have to allocate specific units which causes a lot of pain
It would be nice if in the packout process we could pick the line / release number that would solve our issue
But the fact it automatically ships everything on line 1 even if that line is unfirmed is silly
Currently you can specify a Line / Release and Quantity (from Inventory or WIP) this would just add the option to select a PCID too (for the given Line /Release)
I guess it depends on who knows/is making the decision of what inventory in what location goes into what PCID.
It doesn’t have to be done in FWB with allocation, you could reserve/release, and then have the picker pick specific lines/releases into the appropriate PCID from the appropriate inventory locations.
We aren’t picking into a PCID we are shipping the whole thing. We have 50 pallets (all have PCID one per pallet already in inventory) we just want to ship them all.
Current option is either you allocated the PCID, Pick it and Ship it
Or you Reserve / Release and then you have to Scan and Create a new Shipping PCID in which you basically merge all other PCID’s either way is a slow painful process when we already have a list of exactly what we are shipping
We have had similar issues and found that it is all because of dates. The PCID automaticlaly selects the open line/release with the earliest ReqDate. we resolved the issue with careful date management on the sales order. Another tricky thing for us was that we like to use Lock Line quantity so release 1 must be the LAST release to ship, so we need to make sure that release 1 has the greatest date out of all the releases for that Line.
Thanks for pointing out the date issue @djonason. We use that same lock line quantity process. I think the date on rel1 is blank, I will look into that today.
I agree, it would be great if when you pack a PCID it would allow you to override the selected line/release. some one should submit it as an Idea on the new Epicor Ideas thing. I would vote for it.
We ship PCIDs as well. For PCID’s created through Build/Split/Merge and then dropped manually on to a Shipment Entry; it is sub-optimal that it chooses the SO/Li/Rlse for you. They should change that.
FWB has its drawbacks, but the pickers really like the electronic queue on their handhelds versus manual paper and looking up or searching for locations.
