Backflushing jobs with virtual employee slows dramatically each week

Epicor ERP 10
1

Cross-posted at EUG. Apologies to those monitoring both forums.

We use a custom updatable dashboard to complete our jobs, so the production employees do not have to complete them one at a time. Our assemblies have 5-50 sub-assemblies. The top level assembly final operation is completed, triggering a backflush of all material and labor for the preceding operations and all sub-assemblies. We are on ERP 10.1.600.23.

Labor detail records are created for every operation with labor. This is not excessive for the database (15-20K records/week). However it appears each insertion of a new labor detail record invokes a select of existing records for the same employee and payroll week. Perhaps it is calculating total applied labor for the employee/payroll week to use for some purpose.

The behavior we are seeing is these job completions / labor backflushes are very fast the beginning of each calendar week. By Wednesday they are noticeably slower, i.e the total time to complete each job is 3-5X. By Friday it is intolerable, in the 10X range with anecdotal incidents far exceeding this. Our consultants researched this and provided sufficient data to Epicor for them to acknowledge there is an issue and have stated they may address it in a future release. No date commitment, however.

We have three virtual employees defined and the person completing jobs now alternates the employee used to close jobs a few times per day to reduce the slowdown experienced. We are considering modifying the job completion dashboard to cycle thru a configurable number (50?, 100?) of virtual employees each time a new top-level job is completed. This should provide the needed relief, but is a bit of a hack.

My question is, who else here has a similar environment (completing/backflushing multilevel BOM’s using virtual employees) and what have you done to mitigate the architectural side effect of using one or a few employees for this purpose?

Thanks in advance. -Cliff

2

I am not in this scenario, but is your virtual employee clocking out each day? Wonder if it is the accumulation of labor details in one payroll date.

3

Are you clocking out the employee daily?

Brad

4

Miguel and Brad, thanks for the fast reply!

I am checking with the developer of the job completion dashboard. I looked around for a place to clock out/in the employee myself in our Test environment. The Shop Tracker in Job Mgmt looks like it would work but the virtual employees do not show up there.

Anyplace else to check for the ability to clock in/out? Should the Shop Tracker work?

5

Do you not have the MES client?

6

No. We purchased MES but decided against implementing it for now.

Is anyone aware of a non-screen that can be used to clock out an employee?

7

Ok, so you use time and expense entry to submit daily and start a new day.

or you could install one MES client for some one to do the clock out even if it is at someone desk.

Brad