In our current E9 setup we are using service connect to import labor head/detail records from a spreadsheet for all of our engineers time. The spreadsheet contains their employee ID, job number, and all other labor information. It works good in E9.
We have all but eliminated the need for service connect in our E10 setup, except for this one process and I want to get rid of it. I thought maybe an updatable BAQ would work, but that seems a little dangerous to allow mass updates on the labor objects like that. I looked a little bit into the Import Labor process but that looks to be specifically for Mattec. Any good ideas besides DMT (which we don’t own)? Or am I going to have to bite the bullet and upgrade this service connect workflow?
Jason,
Would you be interested to share your E9 import. I have one in E9 to for importing data from Jira. I’d be interested to see it from another persons perspective.
Perhaps you could build a tool in .NET and plug it into a BPM, perhaps firing it from a button on a UD form, or a schedule of some sort. You may even be able use the same assembly and use SQL CLR and a SQL Server Integration Services package on a schedule. Whatever you do I would suggest some sort of staging table for the data. Having this allows you to go back to an unabridged copy of the source data, particularly if ESC consumes the file and it is deleted.
Apologies if this is something you already know or have thought of.
Personally I have field technicians that clock time through a 3rd party mobile app and use SSIS to push the information through DMT. DMT is a great tool if even if you don’t use it for anything scheduled and I highly suggest getting it. I don’t think it costs too much either.
As for your situation, do you have MES? If they are in-house then MES would be the way to go, they would just need a cheap work station on the network.