I’m looking at adding battery powered QR code scanners to locations on our production floor to track the locations of jobs as they move between work centers. Someone has proposed maintaining a separate database of scanning events, but it seems like it would be best to keep all of this data in our Epicor Kinetic ERP system. From what I can tell, jobs have a model of location history in their activity, but I think that’s intended for the AMM module. If we aren’t using the AMM module, can that location history still be used? Can an external service create “To Location” operations that populate that history? Is there a better approach?
I apologize if I’m using the wrong words. I have experience creating BAQs and accessing them over the REST interface, but I am probably butchering the proper terminology. Thanks!
It may be doable… if you scanned values into a UD table with Keys including JobNum, AssemblySeq, BinNum, etc. You may be able to collect that data into Epicor.
How are you looking to present this information? Just a dashboard of active locations? Do you need full movement history? Just trying to think depending on how you’re going to USE that information, you’d have to massage various reports to add your UD table to get to it.
Location history is based on Resources. Each Resource has a Bin location… Not sure if you can set that all up WITHOUT AMM or not?? We have it, so it is there and working. But not sure if you can assign bins if you DON’T have it. If not, you may need to add a UD field to your Resource table or something.
Basically reverse engineering that functionality and trying to recreate it using UD tools.
We had looked at just having simply a single custom field on each Job that held the last scan location to feed a dashboard, but that location activity table in the Job Tracker felt like a way to not reinvent the wheel while keeping a rich history.
There are some uses that I think a single field could work with, like notifying a work center that a Job (or Resource?) is waiting on the “incoming” shelf in that work center on a TV.
However, there are some statistics like idle time in certain areas that would be really interesting. It would also help our engineering production planners get more information on if R&D development jobs are traveling around as we expect. These R&D development jobs tend not to have accurate standards or sometimes stall waiting on engineering input, and the location history could help us identify that. If each QR code scanner location had a Bin not related to our stock room, I could track when they passed each scanner.
This is going to show my ignorance, but if AMM isn’t using specific tables that are used to track location history, can custom tools populate those tables? Is that playing with fire?
Look into EKW. EKW does not require AMM (however it’s even better with). It does your kinetic/epicor functions from the handheld. You can perform inventory moves, PO Receipts, quantity adjustments, job receipt to inventory, issue material, and so many other functions. EKW uses native kinetic/epicor functionality, so you won’t need to maintain any additional tables. Your transactions will show in part transaction history tracker.
If you are looking to use the Material Request Queue, or hoping to gain similar custom queues functionality, simply using EKW will not accomplish this - that would require AMM.
As far as getting parts to job locations, the resource group/resource bin locations are tied to AMM, however, I could imagine a solution where you add a UD field and a BPM that shows on the issue materials page to indicate the destination.
Hey, everyone, and thanks for the replies! I apologize for going silent. Right after I posted I got the news of the end of on-prem servers, and that will be absorbing the bandwidth I had for this project. Hopefully I can get back to it in a few months.