Working for a tier 1 automotive supplier where EDI is used for receiving sales demand from the customer and sending invoices to the customer.

We are looking at using small projects (PCS module) to control pre-production part numbers and the associated costs. Part numbers change frequently during pre-production and the item master is cluttered with many parts that were never manufactured.

We would like to eliminate some of this confusion in the item master by managing the pre-production phase using the pcs module and once a program goes into real production then transition the part numbers to the item master.

We are using Baan IVc4 ags0 which is a version for the automotive industry containing a whole EDI based Supply Chain module.

Before considering the PCS module, we need to know if it is possible to create sales contracts for customized items and also whether EDI transactions can be generated for such contracts.

I placed a support ticket with Infor and they responded that it is possible to send EDI for customized items.

I have started to look into this in our test environment. I noticed that there is a Sales Contract parameter in tdsls3100m000 labeled "Link to PCS Module"
which I set to "Yes", so it appears that manual sales contracts (not Supply Chain contracts) can be created and therefore it should be possible to generate EDI based transactions for these contracts.

However, we still have many questions as to the viability of this idea and if it will really alow us to properly track our pre-production parts.

So my question is, does anyone have experience creating EDI transactions for PCS items and if so does it sound viable for the scenario mentioned above.

Thanks in advance,

Dave

Dear Dave,

we had 2 systems running connected via internal EDI but on 2 different server locations.

The point is for project items that you need both, item master and project numbers somewho syncronized to have the same customized items on both systems ( if that is what you want or is it enought to have a reference for the source project and item number for tracking?).

Anyway, this was done with some customization and it needs stable business processes (changing orders because of customer requirement is a big task in this scenario).

Regards,

Kozure

Kozure,

Thanks for the reply. We are running a single server implementation, so we would not have the synchronization issue you referred to.

We receive sales schedules weekly and ship schedules daily from customers via EDI.

Shipments are processed and confirmed daily and the customer is invoiced
via EDI at time of confirmation.

This is all orchestrated through Supply Chain Contracts, however, I don't believe Supply Chain contracts can be created for project (pcs) items.

Manual sales contracts can be created for pcs items, which is what we would have to do to make this work. Since pre-production volumes are relatively small it would be possible to manage, however, much testing remains to be done to figure out how to make it work.

Thanks again for your comments.

Regards,

Dave