Help with Issue Misc and EKW or just how to in general

Kinetic ERP
1

Hello.
We manufacture large composite structures.
We have a lot of consumable parts that are issued as miscellaneous.
We run a KanBan system of having shelves around the factory with boxes of consumable in each department.
For example, the Paint team use brushes, tape, and mixing sticks.
So we have a pair of boxes for each of these things, so 10 brushes. When the front box is done, stores picks it up and refills with 10 brushes, issued miscellaneous.

We want the stores to just fill the box, and scan a QR code (or barcode), and it’s isused.

We used to have a big long barcode on the back of the box, which had the appropriate number of tabs between PN, qty, and reason code for the issue.
Worked really well in 10.1.600. Now we are fully SaaS, operating on the browser. There’s no tab control in the Application Studio, so we can’t rely on the number of tabs we have barcoded on the back of 700 boxes.

We are currently in the a trial period for EKW, and the Misc Issue has no scanner template functionality, so that’s not going to work.

Current options
1, With EKW app - BPM Form to get the 3 bits of data as a string > send to Epicor function > do the isuse. Somehow return success or not to the handset.

  • Customisation load I don’t want to take on.

2, Application Studio - make a mobile sized app that just has the 3 fields, then we have a barcode with the 3 bits of data and 2 tabs in it.

  • feels average, invokes huge amounts of frustration, as my App studio guys time is already blowing out because … different conversation.

3, KanBan properly in Kinetic, use the Material Queue in EKW - but how do I raise the KB request in the system?

  • our initial look made us think it doesn’t do misc issues. (STK-UKN).

We would love to hear what solutions people have done for this process, we can’t be the only ones.
Thanks,

Jonny

2

We’re in classic, but the concept is the same.

We have a similar kanban system, but without the misc issue. All of our Kanban parts are standard cost, not quantity bearing and may or may not be on the job.
It sounds like when you refill a bin, you do a misc issue from Inventory, which is a major difference in how ours works.
We have a 2 bin system, each bin has ~30 days of usage in them. Each bin, and the rack that the bin sits on all have cards that have part#, description, picture, and a barcode. The barcode is simply the part#.
When the front bin is depleted it’s put on top of the rack. Inventory goes around everyday and collects all of the empty bins (which again have cards with barcodes on them).
Inventory opens a customized version of Requisition Entry and scans the barcode. The customized logic will either send a PO to purchasing, or make a job if it’s a manufactured part.
The bins sit on a shelf in Inventory until the new parts come in, and then it’s refilled and put back on the rack on the production floor.

3

This is doable in App Studio. Yes, Kinetic Browser doesn’t have a tab-order control… but it does follow the order of the controls on the page. I created a barcode scan customization for our “Issue Material” form which my operators are using daily for scanning/picking materials for jobs.

You should be able to do the same with the Issue Misc. form. The key is… don’t worry about trying to scan values into the stock controls on the form. Create your own scan textbox(s) at the top of the form to accept your scan. If your barcode has tabs included, that’s a good thing. It will take one scan and parse the three values into three different textboxes (PartNum, Qty, ReasonCode).

After the last value is in place, you can trigger an event to take these values and parse them into the bindings where they need to go, in the order you need to enter them.

I can’t really help you there… but hopefully the thread above details how I did this with Issue Material and can serve as a starting point for you.

4

Thanks for the input.

The difference is really the key here. We thought about making the kanban trollies a job, so that we issue material to them, but not sure how the $$ side will work there. Also feels like a big step to make barcoding work better.

5

Lot’s to think about - great link to the other thread, I can see a path forward with this.
We were going to recode all the boxes anyway, so adding in a save command isn’t the end of the world, it’s just a daunting task with so many boxes.

Thank you very much

6

@JKnopp I don’t know how urgently you need this functionality, but it is on our roadmap. If you go with EKW, I would avoid using tab as the delimiter. For a fixed template, my preferred character is the ~ although if you have bartender GS1 QR codes are pretty nice.

7

I think #1 is honestly your easiest option. The function code for it is pretty straightforward.

BO IssueReturn

GetInventoryQtyAdjBrwInventoryTracking (part num, warehouseCode)

OnChangeTranQty()

PerformMaterialMovement()

Wrap in a try{}catch{} and have the catch throw an error message.