We are in the process of implementing Kinetic MES into our shop floor. Our current setup is a completely bespoke system however it is proving to be challenging to maintain and realistically we need to focus on bringing as many processes directly into Epicor as we can.
A lot of our manufacturing processes use sheet material, as such our engineering teams will regularly nest jobs together to use material more efficiently.
We’ve made use of the Epicor job batching functionality (it will only ever be the first operation) and it has worked really well in test. What we’ve then done is add a customisation in MES so that the operator can input how many sheets of material they have used, and Epicor calculates how many co-parts have been produced as a result.
Where we have a bit of an issue is where we batch together jobs for the same part. The simple solution would be - consolidate into one job - however, due to the way we supply our distribution network, this isn’t really viable. Say we have 3 jobs, all for Part A, we can batch them together etc but the system doesn’t create any coparts on the batched job, which means this scenario doesn’t work very well with our new process of reporting qty by sheets used. We could just report quantity… but that muddies the waters and really, in an ideal world, we would have two scenarios -
- Non batched jobs = report quantity
- Batched jobs = input sheet quantity used
The other issue is that, in this situation (same parts batched together), the parts produced are not automatically issued to the original jobs. Is there a setting somewhere we are missing? I can see Material Queue records appearing when we transact these via MES, and Epicor sees the link between them and the original jobs, so I’m curious to know if there’s a method to auto-issue these.
Is anyone else working with a similar scenario? How are you approaching these issues?
Thanks!
