I have a small team of technicians who repair items returned from our field service teams as faulty. I need to be able to process the repair of these items and return the repaired item to inventory for reuse. Ideally I’d like to be able to quantify the amount of time & resources spent doing repairs (by item) so I can develop reporting to help me decide whether to continue repairing in-house or to subcontract instead.
Setup would be to have a part with 2 item numbers:
A01 new item with std cost £10
XA01 repaired item with std cost £7.50
We will supply and fit either a new or repaired part on a service call, depending on what is available from inventory. We have development on our system which creates an item journal record for the same item No which was fitted to allow us to track parts which should be returned for repair to our repair location, so I will end up with either the new item or the repaired item coming back and I need to repair it and return it to ‘good’ inventory as XA01.
I see my choices as either
use the item journal (and the resource journal) to consume the items used for the repair and output the repaired item
use a production order to do the same
use jobs to do the same
I can see problems/benefits to all 3 choices.
2 journals is a bit messy and will complicate the reporting I need to develop
I can’t create a standard BOM for a repair - the parts required will depend on what is found during the repair. How do I set this up? If I repair a qty of 10 and use 7x item B01 in total then the component consumption becomes a bit messy. How do I set a BOM up with item XA01 as the part being output AND as a component?
?? This just doesn’t feel like the right way to do it, but I’m not sure why…!
Is there another way to do this that I am missing? Will the right solution change depending on the quantities in play? All help/suggestions gratefully received!
Kinda hard to reply to this Lots of different way to handle it.
you are not mentionning the Service Module…are those items Serial managed?
The Work Order is a way of doing it. You can add the consumed part in the WO Bom + labor (if using Machine Center instead of resources). I would create a simple form in NAV with:
1st grid: WO list
2nd grid: Production Journal (combines consumption and output journal)
The output would be the repaired item. Consumption would be what’s been used + labor). By using the WO, you can have the right costing on the repaired item.
You create the WO on the finish/repaired part. In the BOM, you add the defective part and later when using the Production Journal, add the item sused to repair. when creating the WO, leave the routing empty unless you have an expected time to repair. Once again, the production journal output will consume the appropriate man hours.
It is an idea…might not be the best but it’s functionnal The only mods is to add that form. The goal of that form is to centralize the info into 1 form instead of 2.
We do something like this at one of our sites.
We use Jobs to manage the time and materials; the complexity and variey of the Repair Parts means that duplicating BOMS on the systemm is not effective. We have some spares that are very low value (resistors, capacitors) as an overhead; for siginficant value parts (depending on value of Repair) we manage the stock; we recrod time on JOb Sheets that are posted via Job Journals. If appropriate we post costs directl against the G/L Accounts. We invoices the customer with Sales Invoices. BY keeping the complexity off the system we can concentrate on the work.
Thanks Jacques and jsrark. I know it’s not the easiest problem to tackle. [:)]
I’m edging away from the production order angle because of the difficulty in consuming the correct quantity of items in the production journal. If I repair 7 parts with a mix of components I need to specify a component quantity per repaired item. Since components required will change per repair I could end up having to consume 1/7 of a component per item to consume a quantity of 1 for the whole repair - that’s a bit messy, IMO. I want to avoid having to raise a new production order for each item being repaired as it’s just too much admin for the guys doing the work.
I like the idea of using jobs and it seems to work for you jsrark. I will do some experiments and would like to pick your brain some more after that if I may!
