We are in the Pacific NW USA, went live in January and are overwhelmed with the amount of data we need to put into the system. We’d like to connect with someone who can help us understand ways of simplifying Information demands for production. Our BOM’s are deeply indented, and our data upload from Solidworks is not yet working. We are multi-site as well. Hoping we could schedule a site visit to someone in the pacific NW who believes they have a good handle on things.
Welcome!
Do you have a license for the DMT? That will likely make initial large data entry a lot simpler for a new implementation.
We also have some pretty complex indented BOMs, but Epicor handles them without much issue. Once your engineering team has a handle of the Workbench it shouldn’t be any trouble.
Multi-Site can get tricky in places--we ended up setting our sister site as a separate Company for lots of accounting specific reasons.
The Epicor framework is very customizable, hopefully you have someone on your team that’s comfortable with .NET, it is well worth investing in customizations early on.
That’s where my head was as well - DMT is probably your best tool if you need to get a lot of data into the system. Here’s a video on multi-table updates though DMT:
We have DMT, and we have purchased CADLINK for transferring the data - we have problems on the solidworks side - getting information in the correct format. My concerns are more around the actual number of jobs that get created, how much detail we actually need from the BOM as we already know how to make many of the subcomponents...do companies track all that detail or do they have methods for simplifying the number of jobs being created. Also, since it is job shop - how do you keep track of the customer for each piece flowing through the factory. Historically, we coupled all jobs by customer and moved them together. It is driving our operations folks crazy to think in terms of just parts knowing that the system will bring all the right parts together in the end. That’s why we were hoping to actually see how others are doing this. I think we are missing something basic.
Having your manufactured components flagged “pull as assembly” will reduce supply jobs, and rather treat them as subassemblies of the parent job, instead of creating subsequent jobs. If your manufactured materials are flagged “make direct” then you can look back from child job to parent, and assuming the parent is tied to the order with a make-to-order demand link, you should know who its for. In terms of processing a single job for an order, you could batch all the jobs - this would solve some problems and might create others. Mind you, I’ve seen several customers do this.
Our Epicor system is so highly customized it’d probably look foreign to a lot of users.
Job Numbers & Detail
Our shop creates roughly 900-1400 jobs per month. There are pros and cons to doing this, and is mostly due to aerospace requirement limitations of Epicor (Vantage) from over a decade ago. Epicor today handles part serialization much better and if we were to re-implement, I probably wouldn’t do this again. However it is rarely an issue.
Detailed BOMs
I would definitely go as granular as you can stomach. MRP will work much better, and if you have materials that you don’t NEED to carefully track, you can have them ‘backflush’ automatically anyway.
Customer Tracking
So we’re a make-to-order shop for the most part, 95% of jobs are tied to a Sales Order which is tied to a Customer. We also have some customizations on our Part Master that allow us to group part programs on multiple levels for reporting.
We’ve created our own Line of Business report that groups parts and summarizes them in a more linear flow than anything straight out of Epicor. The built-in WIP reporting felt a bit lacking; at least when we implemented, not sure how it looks these days.
Example of our bespoke LOB:
Each column is a department, items allow drill-down for more detail, etc. This is completely bespoke reporting.
With ERP implementation, some people are going to be VERY uncomfortable for a while. Moving parts as a “Customer group” may have made logical sense before, but the advantage of ERP is being able to multitask and fit disparate jobs in where there’s room or more efficiency to be gained.
Thank you both. These reply’s are helpful.
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