Customer Specific Labeling with Bartender

Kinetic ERP
1

Greetings Everyone

Wondering what everyone is doing for customer specific labeling requirements through Bartender and Kinetic? We are a cloud user of Kinetic. We plan on utilizing PCID for material traceability. I have everything established to process the BT file from Kinetic and have generated some bt files. I have BPM on PkgControlHeader for PCID as well as tried with a customized report style and definition off of the GenShip report but neither will provide the details i am looking for.

Sorry for such a generic post but really need to understand where the best place to start would be. I feel I might be missing something and making this more complicated than I should.

Looking forward to seeing what others are doing for these.

Thanks

2

We went down the road of making all sorts of unique product labels for different customers and it quickly spiraled out of control and became unmanageable.

Then we put our foot down and created a “generic” label where there could be a dynamic logo image depending on what customer a make to order job was linked to. We have a UD field on customer where we store an image file name. The image files sit on our bartender server in a folder and then we pass the file name in the BT file dataset to make the print job happen.

There was some push back but the new system is working extremely well on the IT side. Only have one more hold out that hasn’t migrated to the new system yet.

3

What we did: find an industry standard. Don’t just cook up something that suits your needs, but something that other partners (inc. partners of your partners) are likely to use.

We still have a couple customers large enough (think Fortune 50) to demand whatever they want. So they get custom stuff. Everyone else gets the standard. Neat part is that a couple of the big boys took a look at our label and declared it compliant with their needs.

4

Hi Tom

We deal with automotive customers and have hard requirements for their labeling. We are not able to force them to use a specific label.

Did you use the SSRS labels from Epicor or did you utilize Bartender?

5

AIAG?

6

Hi John

We don’t speak that term LOL

Yes as well as some other standards for other industries.

How did you approach the requirement in Epicor?

We are new to the system so what i may as could seem basic so apologize in advance.

7

Understood. I’d just caution against making things wildly different on a customer by customer basis if you can avoid it. We looked at ours from a product viewpoint… “what is everything a customer would need to know about this product?” And for us the only reasonable variability was a logo image. Granted it was all much easier for us because we are basically setting the industry standard ourselves (these are labels sewn onto giant curtains) and there is little regulation that comes into play (flame proofing certifications was the only consideration).

8

We are a custom shop when it comes to this.

We do not use any of Epicor’s bartender code, all datasets are handled by a UBAQ that pops json in a folder.

Label types are selected and assigned in customer part cross reference.
Works a treat, though the code could use a bit of spring cleaning.

Seeing as it never errors though, my ugly duckling lives on, so so have I mostly.

9

Are you using an integration that consumes the JSON?

10

bartender consumes the json directly

11

So your using the Bartender Rest Api or a an integration Web service?

12

Hi Kevin

Thanks for the insight.

I assume you are triggering the UBAQ from a data directive? If so, what did you trigger on with shipping labels? If not, how are you triggering?

Can you give an example?

13

Neither. File drop still.

Bartender can consume direct json from any of its modes.

I did write an integration for the rest api, but haven’t switched.

14

Thanks for the confirmation…and …the … REST… Stay tuned…