The subcontract process I think causes my users more confusion than literally anything else in all of Epicor.
-The sales order has to be marked make direct (even though in reality its a drop ship)
-The PO for the raw material has to be drop shipped to the subcontract supplier, and there is nothing built in to default this, the shipping address has to be set manually on the PO each time
-If they forget to link the raw material PO to the job the material has to be received in and then issued to the job even though we never physically touch the inventory (see point above) and they forget to do this, meaning costing on the final goods are often completely wrong
-The subcontract vendor receives the raw material from the other vendor, and then drop ships the finished good to the customer, but there is no way to do a drop ship subcontract po, you still have to receive the finished goods back in and do customer shipment entry to ship them back out again. And again you have to manually update the address on the subcontract PO.
-Sometimes the mfg-cus tran still shows no cogs even when all those steps are done correctly, and you have to run the wip report just to get it to populate
I feel like the whole thing is so clunky and difficult to manage. You can’t just execute suggestions related to these orders because all the shipping addresses will be wrong, because there is no drop ship subcontract order functionality. There is no way (out of the box) to “see” everything that is going on with the order - you have to go to order tracker, job tracker, po tracker, and part transaction history tracker to figure it all out which is extremely time consuming.
No matter how many times I go through the process everyone is still confused.
Does anybody else do this? How have you made it simpler or what customizations have helped? I was going to write an Epicor idea except I don’t even know where to start with this. Help.
I just want to say I agree. It’s a challenge even for simple subcontracts. We have some like you described also and it is always a pain to execute. We created a dashboard to try to line up job costs before we “ship” to make sure we didn’t miss a step. I agree it’s hard to follow and you have to jump from one tracker to the next.
Sorry for the frustration, but I appreciate the post. Good insight. We do a fair amount of subcontract, but rarely (if ever) farm out a complete order. So, its interesting to read the steps and hoops you have to jump through in Epicor (cumbersome as they may be).
Our usual MO is to set up a job with only a subcontract operation, issue a subcontract PO for the part, but the subcontract vendor typically procures the raw materials and we typically receive the part from the subcontractor so we can do a final inspection to verify quality before it hits our end customer. So, we don’t get hit with the front and back-end frustrations you’re seeing.
Again, I appreciate the insight. I know its just a matter of time before we DO have to do this whole process, so it was an enlightening read.
We just abandoned it years ago. We still do the thing, but without Epicor subcontract-ish stuff.
To explain, we do two versions of this:
An entire finished good is outsourced
A component (for a different finished good) is welded here but the galvanizing is subcontracted
I’ll start with the easier one:
For #2, We lump-sum all galvanizing to the finished good as a single galvanizing part number (in LBS), and pay the galvanizer against the same part number. We then hope it nets out OK.
For #1, yes, we also have a make-direct sales order. I never thought about it as a drop ship, but yes I mean you are right. We used to make them here, so I’ve never not thought of it as a make-direct item. But true, it is essentially an expensive convoluted drop-ship.
But anyway, we also do a non-subcontract PO to the 3rd party for that. That one is a qty-bearing part (in EA), so that we ensure we keep track of it all.
We also feel your pain and struggle. We don’t link ours to sales orders, but the struggle is real no matter how it’s used. Any missed step causes a whirlwind of issues that inevitably result in the cost of the part being incorrect.
We’ve tried to come up with alternative ways to do it, but they’re also riddled with process issues and end up being just as much work.
Right now there is no way to create a po tied to a job that drop ships raw material from one supplier to the subcontract supplier. And there is no way to create a subcontract po that drop ships to the customer. The best that can be done is to manually modify the po with the desired delivery address.
If you have Advanced Requisition Management (ARM) there is probably a 1% help here, as you can define “local” locations in ARM for the places you want to drop ship to (from one supplier to another supplier or from a supplier to the customer). You still would have to select the location, but it beats manually keying in the delivery address. I’m not suggesting that if that’s all you would use ARM for it would be worth the price…
