Just wonder what other companies are doing during these time for their data collection?
As of now we have the employees writing everything down on paper and giving it to their supervisor, but we are discussing ways to make it safer for the employees to use a public computer.
Using touch screens on the MES is one way we are thinking would help. It would be easier to wipe down than a keyboard.
A second one would then be using as many bar codes as much possible, we currently use one with the JobNum, AsmSeq and OpSeq to start production activity, but looking what others are using.
We use touchscreens (mostly) and while we also wear gloves all the time (not just since the virus), we’ve provided wipes and hand sanitizer at each of our 15 MES stations so that all our folks can do what they think is best - wipe the device, sanitize their hands if they take off the glove to do data entry, etc…
At our plant, nearly every machine has it’s own workstation, but there are 3 shifts and a few of the machines have to share a computer. The screens are touch screen but they still need to use the keyboard for entering quantities. Computers are “sanitized” after each use with a 70/30 solution of Alcohol and water.
I believe what I decided to go with is using the touch screen with a keyboard app and we are giving all our working their own stylus, that way we should have to worry much about cleaning after every use.
. . . We still write down everything on paper. Would love to utilize MES, but that’s gonna require changing the BOMs, showing production scheduling how to make jobs. . .
Epicor recently introduced the application “Epicor Time Management” for smart phones and it might work for companies on E10 that are willing to expose their data to the public internet (or already do, because they are cloud customers ). It works on my iPhone and I’ve attached screenshots of a company-internal demo. With this, employees only touch their own electronics–as several other responders also resolved using other methods.
Just a point of clarification. You don’t have to expose your Epicor data to the public to use it. Your device just has to be able to access your app server. There are many ways to make that happen without opening up your Epicor servers to the public.
There is a third license type called a Web Service license. I don’t know for certain but it is possible that it could use one of those. They are a bit cheaper than MES licenses but you don’t need one for each user.
For Mobile Apps, you use User Account Security Maintenance to map Employees to Usernames. I haven’t tried mapping multiple employees to a single login though…
I couldn’t see any employee login screen from the screen prints, so I don’t understand how the app would know the users identity, unless as you point out an Epicor employee is mapped to a user.
However, as I understand it, once a person logs on with an Epicor user account, it consumes an Office licence.
If this is the case then it seems to undermine the point of an MES licence.
The caveat here is that I am assuming a web login consumes an Office licence.
This is only for the Mobile Time and Expense Entry and not MES entry. With mobile entry you MUST login with an User account which then maps to an Employee ID. I don’t recall mobile time and expense entry ever asking for your employee ID but it’s been a few months since I supported it.
I’m not really sure Time and Expense Entry should be considered a MES solution. We don’t use it but looking at the info from Epicor and it seems to only be for time and expense collection. Doesn’t have a lot of the job related functions that are in MES. Just based on what I see there is no way that it would work for MES for us. Way to simple. And I think that would be the case for most manufacturing companies like us.
Yes, that’s my point Chadd. It works GREAT for Project labor reporting, which was our use case. But MES is made for manufacturing and a better fit. I was responding to Paul above Covid-19 & MES - #8 by chaddb.
I would think the MES Application (Kinetic) would be a better fit for the phone/tablet.
). It works on my iPhone and I’ve attached screenshots of a company-internal demo. With this, employees only touch their own electronics–as several other responders also resolved using other methods.
