Hello everyone!
I'm wondering if anyone knows of a way, if there is one, to mass update purchased part costing in the Part Maintenance window from the most recent purchase orders?
Cheers,
Marcus
We normally use Costing Tools as part of a process monthly whereby we roll our costs based on the last 6-month period, both for manufactured and purchased part costs. This only picks up any parts that have been purchased or on a WO at least once during that period, and from there we only bother to roll parts that have changed at least 1%. We do a lot of custom manufacturing and WO quantities can very widely, as well as purchased part costs from time to time depending on shipping / landed cost issues, tariffs, etc. It's a double-edged sword though, because while you're keeping your costing up-to-date, all it takes is a bad or inefficient WO or an 'outlier' PO where you had to order from a 2nd or 3rd source at a higher cost to throw your average off.
Normally I start by going into Costing Tools at the end of each month and generating a 'preliminary' .csv file of changes, which gives me what the 'good' costs from the end of last month's roll are vs what the actual cost changes from parts on WOs and POs from the past month would be, drop that to Excel and sort from low/high to find the outliers. We DON'T save the changes yet, though. Next, we reset operation costs in Shop Resource Maintenance / Outside service Maintenance for all EMs and only unreleased or firmed WOs, then Implode Costs from Part Maintenance on all levels, then running the previous process in Costing Tools, saving the changes this time and dropping the 'final' .csv to Excel before going back to Part Maintenance and running Reset Operation Costs to all EMs and Unreleased / Firmed WOs.
Now NORMALLY most customers will run reset operations costs BEFORE imploding; we do the opposite because historically our EM costing was terrible at best, and we were running into massively wrong Part Maintenance costs. We've always had strong Actual costs, so essentially we overwrite Part Maintenance with EM costing first to pick up any of those changes, then Actual afterwards, cleaning up any outliers b/c of exceptions or 'oops'es. The Prelim xl sheet is essentially comparing actual costs from a month ago to 'current' actuals, and the Final sheet is comparing EM costing to 'current' actuals. Ideally, your EM costing should be the gold standard, but depending on how accurate your estimates / setup costs / resources are, these can be good, ballpark or 'on another planet' estimates. Either way, however often you update your costing, DEFINITELY look at what Costing Tools spits out and check the outliers; If your sales / accounting folks are on the ball, they'll know when a cost 'smells funny', but I'd be lying if i said we didn't have a few 0-cost EMs in the past that made it all the way through manufacturing / shipping / invoicing, and that stuff is WAY easier to correct the earlier you catch it.
