I have to make Epicor look “prettier” to the end user and make it easier to use.
One of the things that I want to do in order to accomplish this is to add pictures to the part master. For purchased parts I would like to add a thumbnail of each purchased part.
For my manufactured parts I would like to use the CAD dwg as a basis to supply an image that represents that revision level for that part. I know that @banderson has done something similar involving Engineering Workbench that I am really interested in building myself.
The big problem is that we have tens of thousands of parts in our database, and there is no way I can accomplish this task without automation.
My question is for the Purchased Parts: can anyone give me some ideas on how to accomplish this? Is there a way to automate a websearch and download images for instance?
Regarding the Manufactured parts; we do have CADLink; is there a way to automate the conversion of a part/rev dwg into a thumbnail image and add this to the corresponding part / rev file? There is also the question of upkeep; is there a automated way to add the dwg files to the part and rev without the user having to do too much?
Just wondering if there are any slick ways that have been used to deal with this?
I have done an embedded dashboard that has a URL view to show the attachment
You either can import the links to the part using DMT or if the file names are consistent with the part numbers you can calculate the URL link to display.
I have attached a couple screen shots to show how I did this in MES.
With this approach, you don’t need to click the attachment to view.
In the meanwhile I have learned that our big time vendors like McMaster-Carr have parts image files available… Maybe there is a way to import as well? We do capture the vendor partnumber, but in the purchasing comments together with the vendor description. Go figure.
If you put all of the files into a directory - there is a way to output a fixed length file of the filenames.
You then can link them to the parts using DMT
And then create the URL using the file name directly.
We had cadlink customised to take the preview image from the Solidworks model and import that into Epicor. We then display that image on job entry etc with customisations.
In Image Maintenance you can import images via the Actions menu, either individually, multiple or a whole directory, you can also set its Category and Subcategory, Then in Part Entry under Attributes you can select from those images and it provides a thumbnail… all built in.
Can’t do URLs though.
