I noticed several hundred parts that seemed to lose their PRC and acquire a new one. We fixed it, although flummoxed about how it occurred. And then it happened again. Each time, it is breaking our BOM. I’ll give a specific example.
Last night, every child of Cetec ERP had a child with a QLF PRC (e.g. [QLFWA-737-HS-2022])
Today, without changes being made to these items, most have had the QLF PRC lost (e.g. WA-737-HS-2022).
I don’t think we even created a WA- PRC, so I’m really confused about what is happening. It is causing a lot of problems as the QLF and WA- parts can have different BOMs, QOH etc…
Thanks for reaching out. This is quite odd. Have you done any sort of part import recently? Is anyone working with BOM worksheets on quotes and changing things? I will have to look into this more to see what might be happening.
We started with about 140 problems, which made no sense to begin with. The problems were non-QLF items in the QLF primary BOM. And then one of our guys spent a week cleaning it up and we ended up with the same number. We did an import perhaps 6-8 months ago.
Are all these parts supposed to be non-inventory? I was noticing that most of these are non-inventory and some of them are BOMs. Are all your parts non-inventory? Cetec ERPCetec ERPCetec ERP
Normally not all parts are non-inventory but I wanted to check to see if that was part of the problem or not.
I am so sorry about that. I realized I saw they weren’t in inventory and for some reason thought they were non-inventory. That is totally my bad. I will look at this part and see why this may be happening. Do you know of any correlation of when this happened last time to this time that may help us figure out what might be causing this? Do you use BOM quote worksheets often? Sometimes that can have an effect but I’m not certain. I’ll continue doing some more digging.
We have not yet used the BOM quote worksheets. We just noticed the issue last week - I assumed user error. Then we fixed things and it cropped up elsewhere - like whackamole. That’s when I realized it wasn’t user error but somehow things getting transposed. My only concept is that maybe the "-"s in the part numbers are somehow messing with parsing…
When was the last time you saw the correct components listed?
I’m not sure. I didn’t review the entire BOM. But I am certain that the night before I emailed quite a few were correct that were no longer correct the next day. I did Excel exports of our complete system that evening and then again the next morning. Something like a 100 parts had their PRC changed (in the wrong direction). 31 were changed (due to previous changes by the system) in the right direction.
Who is responsible for making changed to the bom components?
We have an individual user who does the changes. User 14.
How do you normally edit the components, through the UI or through some sort of import?
UI. We did an initial upload, but it is all UI now and has been for quite a while.
Was there anything else happening with the BOM that could be related? i.e. was it on a quote where someone edited the tempbom, was it on an ECO, etc.
nothing like this. We’re rolling out step by step and were just about to do a test assembly when I noticed the problem. There were a certain number with problems. I had user 12 correct them, but others popped up.
Sorry about that. I was looking at the last link you sent me and apparently that was a different link to a different part record and I didn’t realize. I will keep looking into this. Thanks for answering my questions so quickly!
So I am having a hard time reproducing this issue. Is it possible for you to break down the steps you usually take when creating BOM components and what your user does to add them and create them? Also when you export things every night what does that process entail? I am trying to understand your process so we can reproduce the issue and try and figure out what’s going on.
Can we try it the other way around? Can you monitor the database for a period. We’d then fix a group of them - pick them in advance - and then see what other errors might show up and see if anything is picked up on the monitoring side?
The things being changed aren’t the things being most recently changed.
I can summarize the process.
When making new parts, we:
1- Go to Parts → Lists
2- Click “Create New”
3- Select ‘QLF’ as PRC, enter part description and part number and check BOM checkbox.
4- Enter revision and click ‘Create’.
When diagnosing the problem we look at the BOM for items (or do an Excel export). The part I’ve been picking is the parent I’ve referred to before. We then look at the tree and identify any PRCs that don’t match. They keep changing.
When trying to fix a BOM relationship that has a non-QLF part, we do one of two things:
If there is a QLF version still in the system, we merge the non-QLF version into the QLF version.
If there is no QLF version in the system, we make one and then merge the non-QLF version into it.
This is all very ugly. Every merge makes me nervous when it comes to PO and other data. And then when we think it is all done, it turns out it isn’t. I’m happy to have my colleague try to fix it again. It just kept getting me more and more concerned as the problem was getting worse and worse.
Thank you for all of these details. Unfortunately we still haven’t been able to reproduce this. So the best course of action would be for you to fix this again then if it happens again tell us immediately and tell us exactly what you did to cause this. This hasn’t happened to any of our other customers as far as we know so there is probably something very specific that you are doing that is triggering this. Until we know what that is we can’t do much.
I decided to go and do the fixes myself and monitor the situation. I didn’t run into the problem. Somehow, although I don’t quite get it, the person I assigned didn’t managed to do it right and was just cycling through issues. I don’t get it because I had walked him through the change process and had seem him make changes correctly. But somehow it didn’t work for him, but it did for me. Thank you very much for your support and sorry to have bothered you.