Tracking of changes done to shipped products

Kinetic ERP
1

Hi,

Looking to see how others may be handling this situation. We ship a product out to our customer and after that it needs to be upgraded, modified, etc. To do the modification, the product sometimes is sent back under an RMA, sometimes a Service Call and Job are created to send a tech into the field to do the modification and sometimes we just send the parts on a sales order and the customer makes the modification themselves. Currently, the product is not serial tracked in Epicor, but maybe that is our answer.

The problem we have with this is that we don’t have visibility of those changes when that customer calls back up and needs replacement parts. The product does go out with a serial number, but it is just an order/line format that gets us back to the original order.

I believe serial tracking, along with use of RMA, Service jobs, etc is the answer to get the tracking of changes by serial number, but I am wondering if there are any other “out of the box” options that anyone else has used? Thanks in advance!

2

A wise consultant said in order to get the data out, you have to put the data in. The system won’t know what happened offline. If you know the serial numbers of the items you are going to upgrade, maybe you can re-label the upgraded items with a new serial number, maybe add a -1 to let you know later on that it was tampered with.

2 Likes
3

Thanks Mark! I am going to push for the use of serial tracking, but my fear is that the additional work involved will push us towards some sort of customization. As you said, the information has to be in the system to be able to retrieve it later.