How do you know when you can or cannot fulfill a PO from your plants?
For example, you get a PO for 3 parts and you would like to fulfill it from your west coast plant if possible because they are closest to the customer.
You start putting in the sales order and on the release tab you see that you can choose your west coast plant as the plant to fulfill from.
However, you learn later that the plant does not stock this part anymore and it will have to be shipped from another plant. You now have to go back and change the order.
Our CSRs are using the drop down for plant on the sales order release to assess whether we can fulfill orders, but the drop down does not reflect what we currently stock at the plants. This is due to the fact that you can’t delete a plant association from a part once transactions have taken place. This means that when we stop stocking a part a plant there is no way to get that plant to stop showing up on the sales order releases for that part… which leads to the CSRs thinking that it is still stocked there.
In short, how do you know when you can or cannot fulfill a PO from your plants? Our current method doesn’t work 100% because of the situation detailed above… we stop stocking it, but can’t delete the plant association from the part.
My first thought would be to put an “Inactive” UD checkbox on the PartPlant table, and then customize the dropdown box on the Order Release form to account for that.
Then the question would be who is responsible for maintaining that checkbox in each plant.
Ernie, I appreciate it, I also thought about customization right away since I didn’t see anything that natively inactivates a part for a plant, but I wanted to ask the larger group about any native solution before doing a customization.
As far as you know, there is nothing that natively inactivates a part from a plant?
Ernie, I was thinking I would use a min max filter to see if the plants are using these fields. If they are then it would signal that they are stocked… If they aren’t (they are 0) then it would signal they don’t keep stock.
These fields are already maintained by the staff there since they use them for MRP processing transfer order suggestions.
You can add an EpiFilter on the native combo to check these fields and filter the list. Unfortunately the main plant always pops up, but there will never be a case that the main plant isn’t eligible to fulfill since everything comes from our main plant.
There are many posts saying use a custom combo to get filtering and values just right, but I would love to avoid creating the custom combo.
When there is more than one way to skin the cat, you should (a) use the one that fits as closely as possible to existing procedures; (b) use the one you’re most comfortable with; or (c) use the one that pisses off the fewest number of users.
The actual order of those varies from request to request.
We are going Live in JAN with a two site setup and there is nothing out of the box that prevents stopping a part sale in the wrong site. I am looking at using UD fields, BPMs and modified searches to stop parts being sold in the incorrect site. The one issue I am baffled by is Epicor will let a line go into a SO with the wrong site and the only person who would find out is the person doing the pack slip and only at the very last step in Epicor i.e. clicking shipped! Then you get the error.
One more thought, in case it could be useful for you too. It does put the responsibility to analyze on the order entry personnel, however.
We have a “parts availability” tab via embedded dashboard that shows users part QOH in multiple plants in our company. We store inventory in multiple plants for some parts and determining where to ship from can be a combination of geography as well as part availability. We do default based on the product group sales plant for many of the parts. But sometimes it is better to ship from a plant that has all on hand. Our users provide positive comments on this customization frequently.
Nancy, I appreciate the suggestion. My mind also went to using some sort of dashboard. I like that you made yours in sales order entry and the fact that it uses data from the order to give a more detailed picture of the part availability- pretty slick!
I was hoping to cut out any analysis by order entry personnel because I am often told that they don’t wish to spend their time having to analyze details like this, but if that is the only way to understand whether they can or cannot fulfill an order from a plant then I guess that is what they have to do.
Thanks again for the detailed dashboard, I like the idea.
Matt, that is exactly the case. They enter it and then the plant tells them they don’t stock that part. I would like to know that before it comes back from the plant that they don’t stock it!
We created a BAQ and set it as a Zone BAQ for the OrderDtl.PartNum field in Extended properties. This lets us know at a glance what warehouse has Qty regardless of the site.
