When entering finished production and issuing materials, sometimes a record will lock and the transaction appears that it did not complete, because the finished production does not show on hand.  If you run transaction reports on the components, it issues the material up to the record that was locked.  It took many tries at this before this was figured out.  So the person issuing material would just keep trying every so often not knowing that every time part of the  BOM was being issued, causing our inventory records to be off.  Has anyone else had this problem?  It seems like if it could not complete the transaction,  it should not save it.  We have some BOM's with 200 parts,   it is very time consuming to check the materials when this happens!
 
Tara Cook
APA, Inc.

Actually, there might be some things that could be done to at least minimize the problem.  One possibility would be that whenever a component inventory master record was locked, store the transaction info in a temporary file and move on rather than stop and abort the process.  Then the work order could be processed and costed correctly and the temporary file posted at a later time to update the inventory.  There are drawbacks to this approach but perhaps less than the current logic.  I will look into it further.

OK, how does this sound?  There is already a file named WOEMAT which is a parallel file to the WOMAT work order material transaction file and is used for the import program.  We could use that file here as well.  
 
As the components are processed, either in WO-G Kit/List issue or WO-I Backflush, before a given component is processed, all the necessary records in the various files will be locked.  If they can be, the component processes.  If not, the component is not processed and the information is stored in WOEMAT for later processing.  Move on to the next component.
 
The cost from the incomplete transaction will be posted to the WORKORD file so the Finished production is fully costed.  The Close Work Order capability in WO-I and WO-J will check for unposted material and prevent closing the work order if material hasn't been fully posted.  I think this already happens to prevent closing a work order with unposted imported material transactions.
 
At the end of the day, somebody in production or inventory control would run a posting routine that posts all the WOEMAT records and clears the file.  See any gaping holes in the logic?  Only one I can think of is Lot/Serial control - we would need to determine when that posting would occur - at the original attempt or the end-of-day cleanup posting.  But for people who do not use lot or serial control, I think it is pretty straightforward.