Short and sweet question @josecgomez @klincecum
We are SaaS Govt Cloud, on Epicor for 10+ years, and still schedule with Excel. Do we bother with Epicor scheduling, or is that a complete time suck? Create something custom to help schedule outside of Epicor?
If we should invest, gotcha’s to work through before forking out $$$$ for professional services? Unless someone wants a side gig 
From my experience with scheduling in Epicor so far, it depends on how well fleshed out you have your products engineered out, as well as a good understanding of what your actual resource capabilities are. Our approach is to bring together the Epicor schedule and our Excel schedule over the next couple months, as we refine our resources, and better understand what works and what doesn’t. I just wish I could see more than one job on the board at a time, rather than having to look at resources and groups for scheduling.
Scheduling is one of the dark arts… and I am NOT one of it’s better practitioners, but there are several on here who are.
That said, the Epicor Scheduling module is probably average-to-above in functionality, but (as @twinfeatherz indicates) the default tools and reporting are probably significantly different than what you use now and will take time to get comfortable with.
I would recommend downloading the Scheduling Technical Reference manual from Epicweb, and read through the functionality with your production folks to see what they like and don’t like about it… then come back here and maybe we can answer some of their concerns beforehand.
https://epicweb.epicor.com/doc/Docs/Kinetic_techrefScheduling_2024.1.pdf
Before moving forward, make sure that you know exactly why you need to ditch Excel… because you’ll quickly find yourself knee deep in the mud trying to make this thing works and you’ll ask yourself “Why are we even doing this ?!?”.
If your business case is strong, the time, effort and changes needed will be worth it.
Anyway, be ready to dig in the documentation (which is severly lacking in some aspects) and make a lot of trial and errors.
Epicor scheduling is definitely worth it if you provide it the information. What I have seen most companies do is not commit the time to understanding how important the data is and just want to flip a switch and have all their problems solved. If you understand the building blocks, enter accurate data, and adjust where you went wrong it will work just fine.
IT works but you need to make sure that your Bill of Operations is correct and that your Resources and resource groups are setup correctly. Also, the person must be able to work with your Buyers/Material manager to verify lead times on material.
IF these are not doable than it will not work, or you will need to be able to update your times on the fly.
If you use the Multi–Resource Scheduling Board, you will be able to see all of the resources at one time or what resources you pick.
I expect that we will need to change how our resource groups are set up as its not ideal. I am working through the foundational aspects in Pilot but have some concern about the time investment it will take to learn this bad boy. As we have all experienced, folks will throw their hands up and go back to their shadow systems on the first roadblock.
@rgibbons The planners create the jobs now knowing what material is in the shop since it is typically supplied by the customer but not always.
Good point on lead times. Sounds like I might need to ask the planners to start filling in the lead times & due dates for the subcontract operations. Queue time is another one that seems beneficial.
@jkane yeah, that is my concern. It’s going to get too complicated for them since we tend to love our excel files. From what I gather, I will need to make sure folks are also selecting the correct Resource Group and Resource, which will be a culture change for some.
So do we, but we are working toward getting scheduling working for us, from both directions.
A → Modifying our processes to better fit existing functionality
B → Customizing it to better fit us
It’s on our roadmap as an essential task, but not currently a high priority.
I’m sorry, but I don’t have any magic insights to share.
For the excel diehards I have built updateable dashboards that have the same data, but it is stored in Epicor. I have jobs, mold, quality and am working on wire cut.
You can replicate all of job entry in a dashboard, so planning can do mass operations on jobs.
post processing on get details you can flex most data on job operations like resource group, scheduling blocks, setup and run time, so before it is scheduled you have what you need. What we have on the boo is not what ends up on the job.
We are a custom job shop - every job is different to some degree. Not sure what yours is like.
I’ll add that the scheduler has only two major drawbacks that we can find.
We plan to use just about all the little bits and pieces of it and are working with CSG now to see if we can get around these two aspects.
Until then, our production mgmt staff just will not give up the Excel sheet method.
If you don’t have management support to institute the change, then it will always fail. Management needs to say, we are spending $X on a system we are not using and decide if they want to use it or just keep spending the money for no return.
If you have the advanced planning & scheduling module, you can use capabilities to have the system select the resource based off of availability. It is one of the best features in Epicor.
I was hoping you had something crafty up your sleeve.
@gpayne you have peaked my interest on what you have developed. I can imagine that we might take a hybrid approach until we work through the process.
We have a mix bag in the one site, some are long running jobs with unmanned runtime (which is still a challenge, planners fill in this data after the fact).
We currently don’t track setup. So, I can see that being a hurdle in our shop if we need to ask the machinists to start using setup along with production in MES. They might just pick me up and throw me out of the building.
My current approach (in my mind) is to get all of the foundational setup done, automate data output, running these tools in parallel until we can overcome challenges and process changes.
@amythompson0319 This baq has the basics of making a stock or make direct job. Once you can schedule you can do anything the job scheduling board can do.
We also don’t track setup, so I add the setup to the run time for the job quantity and they just clock onto the operation.
THAT will be much more of a challenge than it seems.
First, the Production Calendar. For each Resource Group (or Resource), how many hours per day is it available? How many days per week? In the beginning I wouldn’t recommend scheduling your operators, start with just the machines and you can add the operators later.
Then the parts… start small. One or two fairly simple part numbers… get a production standard (cycle time) for each operation (some number of pieces per minute/hour). This is really the basis for the scheduler… it has to look at every operation and see how long it will take for the number of pieces in the job. This part usually isn’t all that difficult, but it is TEDIOUS as all get-out.
This is easily handled with setting the correct labor reporting. I believe it is Quantity Only.
Amy,
If you schedule in excel you can schedule in Epicor. Now I qualify that: first you must have a good foundation of accurate Methods built. I setup a brand new Wood plant for our company that we started from scratch. Built the building, installed equipment and then implemented Epicor from day one for production for the items that were given to them to mfg. with core Epicor scheduling. We made a few changes to the Multi scheduling board order of information to make it easy for the staff so they did not have to look at useless fields. We also constructed user defined dashboards to give them the real time information that they still were copying into excel. I told the staff that if they were doing any additional work in excel to give me the format and I would duplicated it in Epicor so they had real time accurate data. There is always resistance to keep people out of excel. But having them continue to use it is a waste of time and the information is no longer valid as soon as they complete it. The master planner creates a weekly schedule in Epicor and releases jobs to the floor and provides them with a list by work center of what they need to do.
Just a few screen shots of the dashboards our staff use
This is a view of our multi resource scheduling layout
in the list view they can filter by operation and sort by part
Any way food for thought. We have put others plants in our organization as they are ready using core Epicor scheduling.
Jeanne
