Methods, revisions and mass changes

A job’s method is copied from the part revision’s method of manufacture, which engineering maintains in Engineering Workbench through an ECO group. Keeping those methods tidy is what makes jobs, costing and reports come out right. This page covers three recurring method-maintenance tasks.

How methods are stored

Table	Holds
PartRev	Approved revisions of a part
PartMtl, PartOpr	The approved method: materials and operations of each revision
ECORev, ECOMtl, ECOOpr	Working copies checked out to an ECO group in Engineering Workbench

When you check a revision out, Epicor copies PartMtl/PartOpr into the ECO tables. When you check it back in and approve it, the ECO copy replaces the approved method. Problems usually start when the two sets drift apart.

Tracking a customer’s drawing revision

Customers who send drawings have their own revision letters. Two workable approaches:

1. Record the drawing on your revision. Keep your own revision scheme and store the customer’s drawing number and revision in the revision’s drawing field (ECORev.DrawNum while checked out, PartRev.DrawNum once approved). It flows onto jobs and printed travelers, so the floor sees which drawing to build to.
2. Use the customer’s revision as yours. If the method exists only because the customer defined the part, make your part revision match theirs exactly (for example rev C in Epicor for drawing rev C). When a new drawing arrives, create a new revision with the new value. This is simple and makes order entry obvious, but mixes two numbering schemes if you also revise for internal reasons.

Customer part numbers themselves belong in Customer Part Cross Reference, which can also hold a customer revision. See Customer part numbers and order data.

Replacing or deleting a component everywhere

Mass Part Replace/Delete (Production Management > Engineering > General Operations) swaps one component for another, or removes it, across every bill of materials in one run.

1. Choose Replace or Delete.
2. Enter the component to change in From. For a replace, enter the new component in To.
3. Select Process and confirm.
4. Review what changed on the results card. Every affected revision also gets an entry in its revision change log.

How it treats revisions that are checked out to an ECO group:

Revision state	What happens
Not checked out	PartMtl is updated
Checked out, not yet approved	The ECO copy (ECOMtl) is updated
Checked out, already approved	Only PartMtl is updated. The stale ECO copy is overwritten from PartMtl next time the part is checked out

Caution

Open jobs already carry their own copy of the method. Mass Part Replace/Delete changes future jobs, not jobs that already exist. Update open jobs separately if they need the new component.

BOM Cost report fails for some parts

Symptom: the BOM Cost report (or another indented BOM report) errors or stops partway through for certain parent parts.

Cause: the report walks each material line recursively. If a mass import (DMT) has left a material line where ECOMtl.MtlPartNum and PartMtl.MtlPartNum disagree for the same sequence, the report can’t follow the structure for that part.

Fix:

1. Find the mismatched lines with a BAQ joining PartMtl to ECOMtl on company, part, revision and material sequence, filtered to rows where MtlPartNum differs.
2. Delete the bad material line with a DMT Bill of Materials delete.
3. Re-add the correct line with a DMT add.
4. Re-run the report.

Prevention: when importing methods, load them through the ECO path and approve them, rather than patching one table directly.

Related pages

• The job lifecycle
• Customer part numbers and order data