Has any one changed the Lot ID structure after using the structure for a few years ? If yes, how to do it ?

We have a requirement as follows :
Our Lot ID structure was defined as 112299999
11 - week number
22 - Year (2 digits)
99999 - running serial number

Due to the above what happens is that the Lot received in week 45 of 2008 gets the code of 450800001 and the lot of the same item received in week 23 of 2009 gets the code of 230900001.

Now if you see the following are the lot codes available for outbound :
230900001
450800001

When we do a Generate outbound advice for this item, the lot that gets picked first is the 230900001. Which is not correct.

All our Items outbound priority is "By Location". As I understand, within location it will then search by Lot numbers and the result is that the older lot remains in the system and the recent lot gets issued.

In order to correct this we want to modify the Lot ID structure to :
11 - Year (2 digits)
22 - week number
99999 - running serial number

This way for the same example the lot numbers would be
084500001 instead of 450800001 and
092300001 instead of 230900001.

This would solve our problem. But when I try to change the settings, the record doesn't get saved and prompts an error message "position already occupied".

I would like to know if any one has succesfully done this change and if so how ?

Regards

Did you try chaging the Outbound prioirty- to FIFO?

Arvind Patil

Changing the outbound priority is not recommended since we still want it by location but within location by Lots. Moreover the session to change the outbound priority is damn slow and cannot be completed on time unless we do it Item by item. We can't do it item by item as we have more than 50000 items in our item master.

So that is why we want to change the way Lot numbers are created.