What's my best option? Part creation from Sales / Customer Service

Kinetic ERP
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We are trying to automate more tasks, and streamline a bit.

What we want to do at the basic concept level, is have our sales team fill out a form with all the relevant data for creating a part, and then have our engineering team finish it out.

Notes:

  • We aren’t licensed for configurators, and I don’t know anything about them, but if that’s the best option, don’t hold back.
  • No, we do not want to use Part Entry (For the sales people)
  • Yes, we want to actually create the part, not just enter data.

How do y’all think I should approach this? Y’all know I can code, so keep that in mind with your recommendations if you feel that is relevant.

Thanks in advance.

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I created two separate part entry forms for sales and logistics to create parts, the fields that didn’t belong to them were set to read only

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So it’s a make to order part, or is it going to be stocked part in its own right?

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If you don’t have configurator, and it’s a make to order part, then can’t you:

  • Call Order Job wizard to create the job.
  • Have the Sales order users enter the details into the Pick/Job comments for the line.
  • Have the Engineering team modify the job based on the comments of the SO line. (maybe link that detail to the MTO demand link tab/card)

I have never done this and perhaps using a template method attached to the base part may also give you some prefilled engineering data that you can work with.

We have automated the job creation which by passes the order job wizard for configured parts. (it’s a bit clunky) and does not work for multi site routing. (I wish I could understand how we could get that working ) :sob:

So I’m providing my suggestions and hopefully a person more schooled in the dark art of manufacturing in Epicor will step in and point us both in the same direction.

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Probably would need to know what fields are required for an order and how parts are ordered. Like Simon says, do we ship from stock or custom order? If you need a way to create a lot of parts, it sounds like custom. How many attributes? Is it easy enough for customers to do? If so, a web page that both customers and sales could use might work. :thinking:

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Hi Kevin,

We use the configurator for basic part numbering / addition to part master by sales for many of our parts. The smart string naming convention that’s built in (we do it based on the sales order / line / release) is very useful for us and then on entry sales enters a detailed description for the part and that gets into the new part, I think via bpm. Epicor uses the part setup as the basic configurator as the starting point for part master creation.

We also use some simple configurators to create basic skeleton of a bom from selections made by sales, as a starting point for engineering.

A caveat, we are still using classic configuration, I have heard some gripes about the kinetic configurator but I can’t believe it would be that bad for this basic configuration. If the configurator is not an expensive add, maybe that’s the way to go since it is designed to do what you want and it SEEMS reasonable that Epicor would ensure that it continues to work on upgrades.

FYI, here’s a copy of one of our very basic configurable parts, engineered part where all 3 plants and initial rev 0 and other stuff gets defaulted into part created when sales uses this configurable part number on sales order.

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Nancy

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Sorry guys, in my haste I apparently glossed over relevant details.

Ok, we are a make to order company, however we operate entirely as make to stock. Our make to order is over long time frames. We will do one-offs, but that’s rare.

Currently, the sales team takes all the data from a customer, and fills out an electronic form(not epicor) and passes this info along.

I’ll go grab one when I get to work and see how detailed it is.

I do know that customers give us specifications, or we create them with the customer if they need guidance.

We are a blown film manufacturer, primarily in polyethylene, but we also do compatible or comparable plastic blends. We have different types of folds, cuts, serrations, widths, gauges, uoms, special properties, additives etc.

Sales gathers quite a bit of data, but it’s not a massive amount. They only do basic calculations. Engineering does the complex stuff. (We plan to move a lot of that into Epicor as well, but not with this project.)

I’m not opposed to using a configurator, I just don’t know anything about them, or what it costs. I’ll contact my CAM and see, but even if it’s cheap, I want to be sure that’s the best way to go.

Would like to try to start this project in the Kinetic UI from the start as well.

Thank y’all for the responses so far.

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I did this on our quote level for one of our capital equipment lines which is more cookie-cutter.

Basically a crap-ton of UD Fields on QuoteDetail. Sales clicks a button on Quote Detail, launches form, they fill in the crap-ton-o-fields designing their machine.

Info from this gets spit into the customized quote form. This is now the baseline for the finished machine. If an order happens, Engineering can reference the quote tied to the Sales Order Line and see all the data that was included in the design. So, Sales sets the design, but Engineering creates the BOM/BOO after an order happens. I’ve kept it pretty high-level because I just needed enough info up-front to generate a quote, but you could get as fine grained as you’d like.

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This was what I had set up prior to going live with Epicor. I’m actually in early stages of pushing this into a configurator so I can have Epicor (hopefully) provide a cost estimate based on the Sales person’s design. Right now, they do the design in a large spreadsheet “estimator” to come up with a price to quote to the customer. Then they have to go into Epicor and put in a lot of the same information so it will appear in the delivered quote. I’m hoping the configurator may be able to do both… plus, I won’t have to keep that external spreadsheet up-to-date with current costs.

Again, very early stages of that phase… trying to learn myself the Configurator piece and since I’m not C# literate, its more of a challenge than it should be.

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Configurator is a beautiful thing when Sales is able to answer a series of simple ish questions (colors, dimensions, etc.) and the answers give sufficient information for the Method of Manufacturing to be auto-generated when the job is created.

If Engineering team still has to go in and overhaul the MoM for 2 hours, then Configurator itself isn’t as useful…

For us Configurator is able to generate the MoM we want 99% of the time. If the job is complex Production may reference CAD drawings attached to the order, but we don’t necessarily need that extra complexity reflected in the Epicor MoM…

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We created 2 configurators. One for Sales that requires the sales person select product type which then makes visible dropdowns, check boxes or data type boxes for that product type’s basic information. We have check boxes that can enable additional specifications for various options. The part number and description are viewable as the selections are made. This configurator only allows the part number and description to be copied to the clipboard or entered into a quote line.
If Engineering’s task is added to the task list of a quote, they will check the part for current designs. If the part is custom, the design is created then Engineering uses their configurator to create the part number and description that gets added in the Part table. Rules were created to also fill in various fields in Part like attributes and integrations.