Just curious as to what hardware is recommended for MES stations? We have two plants about 100 miles apart, one will have about 60 MES stations and the other will have around 20.
Thanks for any recommendations.
We are using low end i3 workstations. 8GB or RAM. No issues.
I would highly recommend Panasonic ToughBooks. They are touchscreen, have built in battery backup (on account of being a laptop), an extremely small footprint, and are very sturdily made. We picked up used ones (CF-19 mk4’s and mk5’s). Running a slimmed down windows 7 they run MES absolutely flawlessly.
that’s a lot to manage, and deploying individual workstations can get costly really fast and we havent even talked about managing 80 different operating systems, an IT nightmare. I’d really look hard at a dedicated terminal server or two (farm) virtual, bare metal or combination for depth… and thin clients with either an embedded os or linux based and use RDP from there.
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Good point Rob on the # of workstations.
We have about 30 stations and used to use thin clients and RDP until IT got piles and piles of complaints about the thin clients disconnecting and taking forever to log in or switch users. Now most of those thin clients have been replaced with low end desktops. We also tried microsoft surfaces as well but they had so many issues that we have a stack of them that no one wants to use. Another benefit of having a combination of thin clients and normal desktops is that you can edit the config file and each department can have a custom MES screen. Otherwise if you edit the config file on the server all of the thin clients get the customized screen whether we want them to or not.
Thank you everyone for the posts. Great Info once again!
We sourced Minix z83 desktops (basically like an Apple TV but running Windows home) with touch screens and ls2208 scanners. Our service provider built a script that auto logons the unit to our RDP server.
RDP works for us because we monitor that for connectivity. We are now looking at ups’ for some of these to allow staff to clock out during a power failure. Some of these units took some power hits but with a reset my help desk person was able to bring these back alive.
RDP works for us because we also have the barcode scanning gun app. From a past job, nothing is more likely to get flak from the warehouse manager than having a native app lose connectivity and force a restart of a large receipt. With RDP the transaction is preserved and a completely different gun could connect to the session and complete it. (Or a desktop!)
The other advantage with RDP is that Epicor is running in a consistent environment. When you run the app natively you introduce variation which only makes troubleshooting more difficult.
We are now getting requests to look at tablets as well. We are working on configuring the Enhanced Quality Assurance module and our service shops like being able to roam around and perform inspections without a tether.
We are currently running 9.05.701 and upgrading to 10.2.100.8 at the end of March. Much of our manufacturing shop use basic Lenovo M83 desktops as they mostly clock in and out of jobs. Today in E9 we use a 2008R2 terminal server with tablets and Bluetooth hand scanners for our picking department. We mounted them on our lifts with AD/DC converters.
Since we are on a tight timeline for the E10 conversion, I decided to stick with terminal server 2012R2 for simplicity and quickness. In the long run to replace all manufacturing tablets/computers, we plan to move to using VMware Horizon View client to connect to virtual machines. Then we will be able to use just about any off the shelf system that is cheap to connects in.
Of course, as Epicor develops their mobile solution that will continue to be open too.
We use 10Zig zero clients and VMware View Linked Clones. Very reliable and surprisingly rugged in heavy manufacturing.
We are exploring using the new Lenovo thin clients that include Windows IoT Enterprise. You can load Epicor native on it without issue. They are cheap, super easy to maintain, and flexible in that you could use them native or as thin clients or both. We’re not sure which way we’re going yet but it gives us options.
We use Intel Compute Sticks plugged into inexpensive monitors with an HDMI port. Some are Windows10, some are Linux, Linux is probably better unless you need to connect a USB printer. We have about 30 of these and they all connect to a terminal server… definitely recommend terminal server.
Hey Ken, are your workers constantly clocking in and out each day? we have about 12-15 Minix computers (4gb ram) and 2-5 compute sticks(2gb ram) that are ridiculously slow. Since this post is almost a year old how has your setup been working for you?
Yelena, How has your setup been working for you? Any slowdowns for the operators or any problems at all with low end desktops?
What transactions are you trying to do on MES.
have you thought about a 3rd party tool. i have used a tool called Bezlio (bezl.io is the website) for my MES transactions because i needed 100 work stations. Bezlio can run on any device, we used Android tablets.
This setup has worked well.
Workers are clocking into job/wip activity (custom forms) all day long.
No slowdowns for us. Most of our desktops have i3 processors and either 4 or 8gb of ram. Even when running lots of reports they have no issues because I think they are generated server-side.