We use sprayfoam as insulation in many of our products. We buy a pair of sprayfoam chemicals in 55 gallon drums. There’s a base chemical and a hardener. We can get 4,500 board feet of foam from a pair of drums. I originally had the sprayfoam using my Volume UOM class but it doesn’t really work because the set of two 55 gallon drums creates 375 cubic feet of foam (equivalent to 4,500 board feet). Typically, a 55 gallon drum has 7.5324306 cubic feet of liquid.
I am leaning towards creating a new Sprayfoam UOM Class with Sprayfoam Board Feet (SFBF) and a Sprayfoam Drum (SFDR). The Sprayfoam Drum would be the base UOM and there would be 4500 SFBF per SFDR.
How should I account for needing the two chemicals (in two separate drums) to create this 4,500 SFBF? I sell Sprayfoam in SFBF and I want to inventory/issue it in SFBF. We track costs in $/bf. Also, I want to make sure that the system knows that I need to have both drums of chemicals to create the sprayfoam.
you create three part numbers: PartA, PartB, and the combined PartAB. to make 4500 board feet of PartAB, it takes two 55 barrel drums, so make that the BOM. the BOM can say it is .01222 of part A and .01222 of part B to make one board foot. PartAB can be a phantom, and then you call out the phantom in any of your top level products. PartAB’s BOM is actually a simple “recipe”.
There are two ways of doing it. You can create a phantom part as @timshuwy has suggested or you can use the two chemicals directly in the BOM of finished part after calculating how units of a chemical is needed to make one cubic feet of spray foam. We have a similar situation where two separate chemicals are used to coat the plastic film. In this case we converted the chemicals into how many litres needed to coat one pound of film and use that in the BOM.
Either way will work although with the phantom intermediate building finished part will be very easy since the phantom will be in board feet already.
If it’s for sales and you want to sell a certain number of SFBF of the chemicals, then I think you’d use a kit part (quantity bearing, non-stock) with a setup like that Tim is suggesting to pull the correct qty of components A and B when you create an order in SFBF.
I assume you’re using Volume class for SFBF UOM?
I have manufactured parts for applying sprayfoam to different square footages at different depths. As I understand, sales kits are typically collections of manufactured parts that are gathered for delivery to a customer. In my case, I need to use two different chemicals to create the actual foam. There are operations involved with the process to create the manufactured part that is sold.
I am also in favor of a custom UOM Class… but I’m going to attack this from the process side… let’s define everything you have to DO first and then figure out how to make all those things happen.
You’ve already said that you USE the items in the SFBF UOM, so that pretty much defines the Inventory UOM for the part as SFBF.
When you purchase the two component items (in drums), are they always purchased in a 1:1 ratio? Does each item appear on its own PO line with its own quantity and price? If the answers to both of those are yes, then you need a Purchase UOM of however the supplier determines the pricing (drum, gallon, phase of the moon, whatever) and then a conversion factor to SFBF.
In a perfect world, if both the above questions are answered that simply, then all you’ll have to do is modify your BOMs so that these materials are now called out in SFBF.
Sadly, it’s rarely perfect. There are TONS of possible complications, the greatest of which (at least that I see) is that the 1:1 ratio might not always hold.
We always purchase the chemicals in a 1:1 ratio. Each chemical does appear separately in the PO with its own qty and price. Purchase UOM of Sprayfoam Drum is our new approach.
We do show the chemicals in our BOM as SFBF. I may be overthinking it by being concerned that if I have one BOM line with 640 SFBF to bring in the base chemical, then another BOM line with the same 640 SFBF to bring in the hardener, that I’d get 1280 SFBF.
Since your base chemical and hardener have two different part numbers, in the scenario you describe you would get a demand for the base chemical part number for 640 SFBF and a demand for the hardener part number for 640 SFBF.
The two part numbers are not really “linked” within Epicor, but in practice they are always transacted together and in like quantities. From what you’ve said so far, I don’t see a software need to “link” them in any other way… everyone who uses them knows how they work.
Achieving depth is mostly about the speed of passing the gun along the surface. There’s a limit to how slow you can go so it makes sense to do three passes to achieve 3" at a constant speed.