I can do a receipt and mass receipt. It’ll work. But this seems entirely too cumbersome to be effective or helpful.
So is anyone out there using this for receiving and in love with the process and willing to share? I want to be a believer. But I think there are physical processes that may be critical that we are overlooking.
Ideally I’d love to arrange a visit to someone (kind of) local if possible. Somewhere in SC or GA or FL (USA).
EKW has robust QR code scanning functionality that makes the process pretty efficient for us. Not perfect, but light years ahead of the old Epicor handhelds. It was a huge challenge working with our top vendors to get the QR codes in the right format on their product labels, but it was worth the effort.
Curious what you are finding so cumbersome? Are you doing any barcode scanning?
We have been using it for raw material receipts for almost 2 years now - actually we put it in ahead of other WMS/EKW processes because it felt most straightforward.
What areas are you having difficulty with?
So I’ll elaborate for the sake of the post, but you obviously know where I am headed.
Physical:
Grab pack slip paper.
Find PO number on paper
Find pack slip number on paper - often there is none; “oh don’t you know we just use the invoice number?”
Find part number or line and the quantity shipped (let’s not talk about UOMs for now)
EKW (assuming you are already in the mass receipt part of the app):
Enter PO; make on-screen keyboard go away; hit some version of enter/next/done
Enter pack slip - which is letters and numbers and not quick to type; again, hide keyboard and tap next
Probably tap GET ALL and RECEIVE ALL
Review quantities
Tap into each one if changes to quantity are needed
I don’t remember half of the other things
Etc.
I am somewhat aware of the multi-scan barcode “killer app” in EKW, and I assume that is part of any successful use of EKW receiving.
But as you said, this necessitates a bar code to exist.
I just wanted to see if that is the “only” way to use EKW and not go crazy, is if the suppliers FULLY cooperate by adding rather specific bar codes to their pack slips to you.
We do not, maybe our process is just a bit more narrow & repetitive than yours - we more or less go through the steps you outlined with bulk steel deliveries. I suppose the difference is then we are putting the material away to location and labelling it up as we go (mobile printer w/ Bartender integration).
Not saying it’s perfect, but it’s been well adopted and if we weren’t doing it this way, the same operator would be doing the same task at a desktop - this way, he’s able to just rattle through the receipts while offloading.
Tom, good to hear and thanks for sharing… I may circle back to this in like a year to ask you about how you handled some situations with the template, etc.
Our starting point was us sending vendors the BarTender template file we use for inventory labels which already had QR properly implemented.
Vendors with “real” IT departments and programmers were able to take that and run with it, adapting it into their own label program / ERP. Others were more of a struggle. A couple we helped set up with the cheapest version of BarTender and trained them on a manual process where they’d feed an Excel data file to BarTender to print the labels.
I think we did about 10 vendors before we reached the point of diminishing marginal returns.
That’s cool to know though Tom. What I struggle with is I feel like, and you can tell me if this was your case or not, there will be some vendors that can do some, but not all, labeling using a barcode and I wish that there was a way to select a receipt flow per vendor where the screen in EKW would adjust given the level of buy-in that the vendor has with you. In other words, if a vendor uses a QR code with all the fields we need to do one scan and parse through the templates, then great, that’s what the screen goes to, but if you select a receipt for a vendor where they have all the values barcoded independently then it would switch to a screen that follows that flow and if you had a vendor that did 4 out of the 9 fields needed all in separate barcodes it would flow that way and once you scanned field one it would jump to field two and then prompt you to manually input field two cause it’s one of teh 5 they didn’t barcode then jump to the next field that they do have a barcode for and so on and so forth so that you were building out a receipt screen for each type of vendor that you service. Up front… a lot of work, but unless the vendor changes (which I feel like many don’t) it will stick for a long time.
I see what you’re saying.. kind of sounds like DocStar for receiving.
I think the EKW user can navigate the UI well enough though. With QR you’re able to sort of scan before clicking into a new receipt line screen and the record gets created pretty fast. Without QR you just navigate the inputs 1 by 1, scanning a barcode for the fields you have and using the touch keyboard to enter what you don’t have.
For us most parts are lot tracked, so QR really saves time on that extra lot number scan. But for non lot tracked we often don’t even use EKW because those items don’t have labels (that we keep at least). We use desktop Epicor to receive and BPMs will actually print our own labels to put on the box/bin.
Yeah agreed, it’s an interesting observation @utaylor . Sorry I think I missed it yesterday as I was typing my reply at the same time.
But as you say, some big suppliers (e.g. Cummins, Bendix) are not going to change for us, but they do a degree of bar-coding already. So we don’t have to make it super QR code vs. all manual entry; there are shades of efficiency.
And it won’t be all that many suppliers - just the biggest ones, most likely. 80/20 rule, etc.