The basis of this idea is that with the shift to the Kinetic UI, Epicor needs to provide a new MES license that is limited to labor transactions for production floor workers. If a company wants to use tablets on the production floor for every employee, the cost of buying hundreds of full MES licenses is very prohibitive.
I have seen a great deal of interest on this site for tablets for production workers, so let’s get Epicor to provide us with a cost effective way to leverage their Kinetic UI.
I get the idea, but, you don’t need to buy an MES license for every user - you just need a few because production floor workers only need to consume a license for a moment while they record the transaction - one license can be enough for many workers depending on how frequently they are reporting labor. In our case they may only clock in/out of a few jobs a day so we don’t need that many licenses. I understand other operations may be different but just explaining why I’m not voting for this (aside from still only having 50 votes).
Our employees need to reference drawings and other documents attached to the jobs, so they will be consuming a license for longer than a few seconds. One of our divisions has small quantity short run operations and they have the potential to be logged into Epicor for 45 minutes out of the hour if they had a tablet to view the required documentation. I know this is not the situation for all companies, but any shop that is building to prints/models and wants to go paperless will struggle to afford to do so.
I’m curious how they are viewing it such that it consumes a license. If you just open an attachment and leave it open and don’t navigate around in epicor I thought the license gets released after the timeout period, but I am not positive. I guess we don’t run into this because we print the drawings with the traveler.
We currently do too but want to go paperless. The only way to do that is to provide employees the ability to easily access and view the documents. Right now, they need to leave their workstation, go to an MES station, log in, open the document or solid file, and hope they remember what they looked up when they get back to their workstation.
I absolutely agree with this. Gave two votes to it. As automation increases on shop floors across the nation easy access to data collection is paramount. We just purchased a pallet pool machine. Each pallet is set up as a resource so that job costs loaded on the pallet can be accurately captured. The problem is that some pallets have operations which only last minutes whereas others may last hours. Currently the operator has to leave the machine, walk to a data collector, end activity, start activity and then back to the machine. In lean terms this is a tremendous amount of waste.
I will say, though, I did not have any need or interest in the whole clock-in, clock-out thing, so I don’t know that world. This was just a version of Time and Expense (“no header”).
But sure, there is a need for your request to Epicor. Just don’t hold your breath…
@aosemwengie1 , while all of this could be done with an MES license, the cost is prohibitive. MES licenses are expensive if all you are using it for is labor reporting and document viewing. Everyone always talks about going paperless, but the effort to do so has been historically difficult. The two main obstacles were cost and poor user interface on tablets. Epicor has taken care of the UI with Kinetic and the cost of tablets is low enough to do it. The last obstacle is a reasonably priced license that reflects what it will be used for.
There is very little development that Epicor would have to do. They could just create a new license type that only allows access to the Work Queue. My personal opinion is that Epicor is putting themselves at a disadvantage without this. If companies continue to digitize their process and can’t do it affordably with Epicor, they will look somewhere else.
Exactly, and if I need 10 licenses just to start or end an activity and report some quantity, a scaled down (cheaper) license would make that much more affordable. I do realize there is more than one way to tackle this problem such as Jason’s response. And I definitely appreciate the feedback.
@jkane , have you considered the Time and Expense (TE) license? That won’t address your document viewing issue, but perhaps the latter could be addressed another way.