I don’t have a good feel for who uses EKW other than ourselves. We have made screen customizations that cannot be used within EKW that limit our use of them.
Has anyone run into this problem or have found a way to even add a field to an EKW screen for customizations?
We are using it for transfer receipts, bin to bin moves, and some basic things. But we are limited based on the customizations we have already in the system.
Ideally, we want to be able to scan packs when we know they are on the trucks to be sure they have been accounted for before they leave the site. We have a process we can build within regular Epicor, but cannot find a way to make it work with the use within EKW.
Just wondering if anyone else has had these frustrations. Do you still use EKW, or do you use iPads with scanning capabilities?
Would love to hear how others are working around this.
Yeah… Customization is a no go for that program. There’s a lengthy hacky way to add fields in their documentation, but that’s as close as you’re going to get for customization.
Our work around was to roll our own app for the stuff we needed custom. Luckily we have staff that can do that.
Brandon,
Yeah, I’ve come to that conclusion, but just wondered how others are getting around the problem, and what devices are they using for their shop people.
There is a lot that could be done on the shop floor that we can use mobile devices to help them, but our customizations get lost when they try to use the devices. We use the EDA71 tablets.
Wasn’t sure what others are using to be more effective on the shop floor.
Yeah, we wrote an angular app and wrapped it up to an android app and distributed it to the the handhelds. So they have 2 different apps. One for the stuff that works out of the box, and one for the stuff that doesn’t.
It’s not ideal, but for the most part, the people that can use the stuff out of the box can stay in EKW and the ones that need the special stuff can stay in our homegrown app, so it works ok.
In our case, we don’t use EKW at all. I roll my own app written in Blazor and use Intune to manage the app & devices.
Blazor is nice to use since we are already in the .NET ecosystem and writing web in C# is neat. It also packages nicely onto Android/iOS in multiple ways.
Yeah, I want to limit its use, but if I have a customization that I can get to work within Epicor, I’m hoping to find a way to allow the shop floor people to use it without being anchored to a kiosk.
I’m just curious as to what other devices are people using…iPads/Tablets to install the full version of Epicor on?
For general shopfloor use, we opted for Microsoft Surface Go tablets, with Epicor MES (or ‘Data Collection’). For scanning, we went with wireless barcode scanners that can be paired with the tablets. However, In our case, the tablets mostly need to be fixed to shopfloor benches.
For our warehouse users however, we also went with EKW, with Honeywell EDA52s. Mostly, this was because the EKW interface is more user-friendly for things like stock picking and receipts. (I also think it performs slightly better, but that’s just my opinion).
MES/Data Collection can perform all the functions we use in EKW and provides the benefit of being customisable, as it’s using the standard Kinetic UI. I know it’s now accessible in the browser, but haven’t tested on our existing Android devices.
The lack of customisation options for EKW is a roadblock for us too. However, I found that BPMs (e.g. data directives) still trigger when using EKW, so I’ve tried to create any customisations through BPMs rather than logic in the UI.
Thanks for the input, Zane. What you went through sounds a lot like where we are right now. EKW has been useful for inventory moves and receipts, but finding uses in some of the other areas, it just makes sense to continue using MES.
Curious, what type of license did you need for the Surface Go tablets? Where they regular Epicor MES licenses?
At a previous company they were looking into cheap Chromebooks for mobile stations. They had touchscreens and a keyboard so could be used as a tablet or laptop. Not sure what RDP client they had for it but they all connected to a Terminal Server to run Epicor. Now if you’re Kinetic you won’t need that at all just the Chrome browser.
IIRC Microsoft makes, or is/was planning, a Surface to compete with chromebooks that may be in the same $400-ish range of those chromebooks.
EKW forms with the underlying dataset represented by a table in the db you can add custom fields to those forms, when the underlying dataset of a form is build by the business object on the fly this feature is not available. Outside of this Biscit can customise the app for you. The important thing to note here is you will not be on a bespoke version, you can continue to take every version as and when its released.
We use ipads that use the RD client app to remote onto a windows server remote desktop.
Most of our ipads are mounted to lifts with ram mounts that buzz around the shop floor. These are paired with a extended range 2d barcode scanner and usually have some quick barcodes for a ‘tab’ and other key information that might be useful in barcode form, so our lift operators don’t have to be touching the screen too much. They work pretty good, price was right, and have been reliable.
Some shop leads also carry ipads to use the same way.
