In MES is there a way to put just one job\operation in downtime rather than all running jobs\operations under that employee ID?
If an employee is running a job and the machine breaks down they would put downtime into MES. If they go to another machine to work on a different job\operation while the first machine is being repaired everything is grayed out from the downtime event on the first machine.
Am I missing a setting or a way to place just one job\operation in downtime?
Hopefully I am right in my recollection, but I seem to remember that downtime was applied against the Employee.
Thanks Chris. So would production operators end that activity that was being performed on that machine instead of putting in a downtime event? If so, how is the production hours and downtime captured for a job that was running on a machine that broke down?
I guess you could take the start time when the first production activity of an operation was started and when that operation was completed and any labor gaps in time would be considered downtime??
After much fighting with downtime my recommendation, rewrite it. My intent is to put a button in it’s place for our own downtime logic that kicks them out of the current labor detail and creates a new indirect. No overlap of the records as it does native. Now, will that work for everyone no, use your judgement there, but I would abandon that function if you can and replace it.
The logic built in is a pain from the reporting side too. Basically all it’s doing is taking the labor detail records and marking them all as downtime then adding an indirect downtime record also in downtime with no end.
When you exit downtime it will remove the downtime check mark from all the associated labor details. There is also a bug where this does not always happen and people will get stuck in a downtime where the production record still shows downtime but the downtime record does not.
Couple that with it does not accrue downtime hours for you to do manual reporting if you need the hours of downtime you are hand calcing it and if you do it in comparison to the production time you are subtracting it back out.
You can’t really customize it either. The whole form is read-only when ending activity which isn’t super helpful as you can’t include any resolution notes or categorize the downtime. Assuming your users aren’t magicians they probably don’t really know the issue going into downtime, maybe they do but ours 80% of the time don’t know why a machine went down. You can put a BPM form over it but then they are clicking through both forms and it’s very clunky. @josecgomez and I fought that for some time and eventually gave up trying to extend that functionality.
It’s a massive headache that I wanted to work in the worst way but it’s just too clunky.
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Thanks Joshua. Sounds a little more involved than I was expecting to get something working that is more flexible than the out of the box downtime. Thanks again for the great reply.
How do you resolve the stuck downtime issue? I have an employee that can’t get out of downtime, gives this error: “Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”
What table are the downtime records in?
I think it is on the labordtl
It’s in labor detail. An indirect record for downtime is created while the production record that was active is marked as downtime. What happens is the production record is not updated properly and gets stuck marked as downtime even though the downtime indirect record is already closed and done. I created an updatable BAQ to combat this.
It’s just a list of labor dtl records where ActiveTrans = 1 OR (Downtime = 1 AND LaborType = ‘P’). I made Downtime, ActiveTrans, and Status (A or E) updatable. Most times I have to fix downtime records where the indirect downtime record closed out but the system never unchecked Downtime on the production record and people get stuck.