Does anyone have experience with keeping track of tooling in Epicor 10? How do you use it? Does it work good?
Kind of a wide open question. We’re mixed-mode, but 90% job-shop - all custom made to order. Some of our tooling is consumable, but has to be made in the machine shop for each job, so it’s a Material input to the job/opr and MRP handles creating the jobs to make the parts. Other ‘tooling’ is really just machines which can do a special thing, so it’s a Capability that is added in the Configurator so the job is pushed to that machine. And still other tooling is really just a special work area for assembly that has some special stuff in it, so that is also added to the job as a resource (by the configurator). We try to keep it simple rather than tracking every little thing. But you can see that we use the configurator to run the logic-code that determines where/when special stuff is needed.
Sorry for the delay. We have custom tool dies that we make so we can form parts. We are wanting to keep track of those as the customer pays for them so technically the dies are theirs. We were talking about putting them into epicor to keep track and possibly do an audit on them.
Hmmm…
In my eyes, I would not say that the molds are theirs - unless they own the top-to-bottom rights to the product you are producing. That would almost be like saying they own a piece of the machine… We have something similar that we call knives. They are used to bend steel wire and can be very specific to a customer, but in the end, the customer does not have complete rights to that particular knife…
I would agree with you that you should probably give them a part# and inventory them, for no other reason that your sake. If they can break, then I would set a safety/min/max stock level and let MRP manage the resupply.
Then I would probably index those parts to the customer and mfg’d part# (somehow - maybe UD table) and use the configurator to ‘add’ those dies to the job dynamically.
If I understand your scenario correctly, that would be the best in the end. Let the system spec the job including the dies (and manage any resupply) and let the guys check them in and out of inventory…That gives a full and precise audit trail in the end.
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