Is anyone using any up time tracking for machines with Epicor? We are looking to implement a way to track our machine shop machine running time and have came across a couple of options that claim they can be integrated with ERP systems but wanted to see what others are doing. We are looking at ShopfloorConnect, FactoryWiz and ThingWorx. All have different +/- but wanted to see if there were others out there that could shed some light on what they are doing and how it is integrated with Epicor.
We are currently on 10.2.200 going to 10.2.400 next month and will not go to 10.2.500/600 until likely next year.
Epicor has a product called Mattec. I’ve never used it before, but from what you’re describing it may be a good fit. And it’s made by Epicor, so it’s guaranteed to integrate
We implemented our own PLCs to perform this task. Mattec was cost prohibitive for us. I did an insights presentation on it last year hope to do another one this year. The components are
@eandres I spoke with Josh last year at length regarding his solution and he’s right about that answer being difficult because he did a LOT with it. If you had a more specific question it might help Josh get you an answer.
His solution consist of data collection and presentation (in multiple analog and digital forms) AND two way interface between the PLC’s and Epicor, with manual and automated response & parameter change events - so an answer to your question just isn’t that easy, except to say the PLC’s collect the data - but you can use any number of middleware packages to collect/present/react to the data from the PLCs. All depends on what you need.
Yeah what he said, that and don’t use LabView as the middleware it’s left a bad taste in my mouth lol. Loving Inductive Automation so far support is top notch, but alas the middleware will also be determined by your goals, aspirations, and needs. It has some very nice scale out capabilities, reporting, alerting, support for ModBusTCP, AB, Siemens, ability to create your own Rest endpoints to interact with, build your own modules for the software if you like. It’s pretty sweet to be honest.
Yeah, I understand it’s a lot to cover here. I’m just trying to look for a direction to start. Some of the “off the shelf” options are pretty pricey and they still don’t integrate with Epicor without considerable effort. On the other hand, unless you have other uses for Inductive Automation, it is very expensive and you have to do most of the work.
Just trying to balance cost vs effort to get to a solution that would eventually track uptime of my machines as well as provide a single interface for MES type operations.
This may be obvious - and it depends on how accurate you want to be - but labor clocked to a machine approximates uptime. We’re looking into Mattec or a homegrown solution still (we just got a decent PLC guy) so we ask that our operators clock into an indirect code every time the machine is down for reasons other than ‘no job to run’. In the end, we have a simple query that totals up “runtime” (labor hours) so the maintenance department can do some simple meter entries for PMs.
Thanks @MikeGross, we are currently doing just that. However, being clocked into an operation and the spindle turning on a mill are not the same thing. If we start doing improvement activities based on being clocked into a job, they will just stay clocked into the job longer. Our parts are not repetitive so the production standard varies quite a bit and is really just and engineer’s estimate.
There is no off the shelf solution that will integrate with Epicor for this (Except Mattec, but that truly is cost prohibitive). No matter what you will need something like a Jitterbit, Service Connect, REST interfaces, or Custom Code. If you are retrofitting machines you will need custom ladder logic built as well unless the OEM can provide something (which is very doubtful, and even if they do you are lucky if they expose the data to you). It’s a big project, for sure but with effort on your organizations part costs can be mitigated, without effort on your organizations part costs will be high. Those topics in this case are more or less mutually exclusive.
On the topic of Ignition, I would argue that relative to everything else we had looked at Inductive was very cost effective for the features it provided. It was about 10k for us to perform central data collection on all our workcenters and provide a means of building a SCADA system… That’s pretty affordable, if you can’t justify that then I’m not sure this project aligns with the company’s goals and objectives.
10K would be very affordable, I will look a little closer. We are a custom machine builder so working with PLC’s is what we do and maybe what I learn we could offer to our customers.
Thanks
The price depends on the modules you need. We only got the WebDev and base product really. We then have WebDev operate in a REST 2 way conversation and let Epicor handle all alerting and reporting vs purchasing the alert and perspectives modules from Inductive. The ability to do it that way would come down to how much custom dev you can do in house.
Hi Ed
In some ways it depends what machines you’re monitoring, how you want to harvest the data and then what do you want to do with that data once you’ve got it
Yes Mattec (and the other off the shelf options) carry a cost, but balance that against the amount of work/expertise you need to carry to support a home grown solution and you might find the numbers balance out. There again if all you’re after is knowing when a machine is running/not running and you have the internal people who know how to hook into that data then following Joshua’s lead is a very good option (we pretty much do all our own dev and have a very heavily customised ERP install so I’m not advocating a “Vanilla” approach at all).
For our part we run 80 plastic injection machines as well as 10+ Assembly lines using Epicor and Mattec. The integration with the 2 allows us to download the MRP plan to Mattec which we than execute (Job Quantity counting (including scrap overrunning, machine moves, tool downs etc all done in Mattec), we then harvest data back from Mattec into ERP for Labour and Material Backflushing as well as any excessive changes to the schedule that require MRP recalc (jobs pushed more than 24 hours back etc)
We use the OEE, Cycle efficiency and Scrap monitors from Mattec to give our Shop floor their targets. These are displayed using External BAQ’s into Mattec from Epicor and rendered using Web pages getting data through REST (we also combine this with First Article flags to let the QA department know if jobs are running without sign off). We also leverage this data into EDA so we can analyse production trends, check runtimes against expected etc. etc.
Yes Mattec looks a bit dated but our planning/ops team love it and wouldn’t be without it. And we make it work for its money.
Not sure if this helps but hope it does
Cheers
Greg
