I’ve read alot of the articles here as well as parts of the Epicor Scheduling Tecnical reference Guide. I kind of feel like there is not a good answer to my question but heres my story.
We created a dashboard that is modelled on the Shop Tracker but it is a historical record of Who’s Here, Who’s Not Here, and added Who’s Late, Who Left Early, Who’s out >35 minutes, Who Worked Overtime. We are required to track and report the number of lates, left earlies and ovetime.
We have a variety of shifts. Most are 4 days x 10 Hours but some are 3 day x 12 hours, 5 days x 8 hours and even one that is 2 days x 10 hours.
One of the things that supervisors are complaining about with using the dashboard is that when an employee on a 4x10 shift is asked to work overtime on the 5th work day, they can come in at any time. Say the shift starts at 6:00 AM but because this employee is coming in on his day off he can come in at 8:00 AM. Because shifts do not have specific days these employees always show up as being late on that 5th day.
Is there some way to define a shift to specific days?
I tried creating a production calendar and adding it to the employee record but I think this only works if the employee is assigned to a resource group? We have resource groups with generic operators in them rather than specific employees.
What is really the purpose of the calendar that can be assigned in the Employee record?
Help, advice, moral support and sympathy would be appreciated.
You’ll have to rebuild your BAQ to take into account policies like this. I’ve never needed to build something exactly like this, but I have built reporting on labor/payroll. You always need a CTE that looks at the whole week, plus one that has detail level records.
You could add a second shift to the employee record via UD field, but you’d still be stuck writing custom code to wire it into everything. IMO, tweaking the dashboard is going to be easier.
They can change the shift when they clock in. That doesn’t help you for the “Not here’s” but if you have them clock into the overtime shift, then you’re dashboard can see that and you can make calculated fields based on that.
It’s a training issue from there, but with any “It’s like this except when it’s not” (like overtime) you’ll have to tell the system that you are doing that.
At my last job, I made an dashboard that looks up any discrepancies (like late clockins, or didn’t show up etc) then linked that to a UD table to list the reasons so that someone could go through and deem whether it’s valid or not.
Agree, would prefer that the system take care of shift assignments but with the way Epicor shifts are designed we may need to do something like asking an employee to clock onto a shift like OverTimeShift in order to track some of these exceptions. Except I know people will forget and not do that.
I added a WeekendShift_c UD Field to the Employee Basic table, added that to the Employee screen in a dropdown. Then wired that dropdown to the Shift BO to pull in the shifts. Now a employee can be assigned a Weekend Shift, that is always different from the standard M-F shift.
On the MES Shift Select screen I have it check day of week and select the assigned shift and close that screen, the employees does not need to select a shift anymore. Placed that also on a Clock-In on Office MES.
This is all win forms customizations and needs to be ported to Kinetic.
While I agree with the sentiment, automation only works when the rules that are laid out in the automation are followed to a T. You do things out of the ordinary (like working overtime) and the automation that is supposed to make your life easier now makes a mess.
Ever try to get Microsoft word to STOP formatting your stuff for you? Or better yet, excel to stop eating your leading 0’s in CSV files? It’s a huge pain! (right @josecgomez)
