Question

Make Direct Vs Make to Stock Problems

  • 25 September 2023
  • 4 replies
  • 198 views
L

Hi all,

Looking for some advice please. Apologies in advance if any of the below does not make sense as im writing this at half past 9 at night!! :)

We are going through a new Epicor Kinetic implementation and currently trying to resolve a few issues we have we process within the system.

We are a bespoke aluminium extrusion stockist and machinist and so every part we buy and sell or manufacture is specific to customer design and so every product is unique and inventory is all customer linked.

Because we are a stockist - a lot of orders we produce will be manufactured and then held in stock for a period of time which could be up to 12 months.

We also have to use traceability for every transaction and so we have global lot tracking turned on.

Originally our Epicor Ops consultant suggested we use Make Direct so that ever manufactured item is assigned a lot number and the jobs produced hit inventory. We then wanted to use fulfillment workbench to review jobs with material available / pick orders for shipment from the sales order. The other major benefit to make direct was the link between the sales order/job and POs so it was easy to see what Sales order a Job related to etc.

 

However, we then did some testing and found a few issues:

  1. The MRP suggestion for the material for the job does not display what job/sales order it is for so in turn it does not display this information.
  2. Fulfillment workbench cannot be used - big blow in my opinion

The other option is using make to stock but as mentioned before, you then loose all the link up with the order which again seems a bad idea to me, and one of the reasons we liked Epicor in the first place was how easy it was to find out transactional information in one place.

 

Just wondering if anyone has had similar experiences and if so how they dealt with it as neither option is really working for us.

 

Thanks, Luke

4 replies

G
Userlevel 3

Good day Luke,

We use both methods of jobs.

We use Make to Order for our repair group.  We have to send a quote to the customer prior to performing any work to repair the device.  Linking the Sales Order to the job, allows us to track the status of the order and follow-up when we do not receive a response from the customer.

We use Make to Stock for our OEM items.  We keep a very small quantity of inventory on-hand, and for the most part, we ship the manufactured item almost immediately.

MRP uses the Sales Order and an entered forecast, to work its magic and tell us what the production schedule looks like.  I don’t know if our operations team uses the fulfillment workbench or not, so I do not know what data it shows or how useful it is to us.  I do know the supply chain team uses Time Phase quite a bit, and it shows OEM inventory being allocated to sales orders.

Not sure if this answers your questions or not, but I can provide more information, if you need it. 

Glenn Owers Sr. Business Analyst Safran Electronics & Defense Canada Peterborough, ON Canada Version: 2021.2..23
slepley
Userlevel 4

We are going through a new Epicor Kinetic implementation

Which Kinetic version are you implementing, Luke?

Scott Lepley
L

We are going through a new Epicor Kinetic implementation

Which Kinetic version are you implementing, Luke?

Hi Scott, its 2023.1.10 Cloud

L

Good day Luke,

We use both methods of jobs.

We use Make to Order for our repair group.  We have to send a quote to the customer prior to performing any work to repair the device.  Linking the Sales Order to the job, allows us to track the status of the order and follow-up when we do not receive a response from the customer.

We use Make to Stock for our OEM items.  We keep a very small quantity of inventory on-hand, and for the most part, we ship the manufactured item almost immediately.

MRP uses the Sales Order and an entered forecast, to work its magic and tell us what the production schedule looks like.  I don’t know if our operations team uses the fulfillment workbench or not, so I do not know what data it shows or how useful it is to us.  I do know the supply chain team uses Time Phase quite a bit, and it shows OEM inventory being allocated to sales orders.

Not sure if this answers your questions or not, but I can provide more information, if you need it. 

Hi Glenn, Thanks for your reply, I think we are likely going to go down the make to stock route and then customize to bring the job number through to the sales order for visibility. Not ideal as it will mean more customization but i am not sure either of the two options will give us what we need.

 

We normally allocate material to jobs to ensure oldest is being used etc - you cannot allocate using make to order using fulfillment workbench so thats a problem. It also creates problems when shipping as the system will try to fulfill the order from WIP and not from stock.

 

For these reasons it seems like make to stock is the way forward unless anyone has a better solution :)

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