Our Go Live is fast approaching (March 1) and now some things we took for granted need to be figured out.
In our experience you can not access both Epicor Kinetic and MES on the same computer. We will have several users who will need to retrieve file links from the Sales Order, but will do most of the rest of their work in MES. I am aware of Office MES, but it lacks some features to log materials and other features.
My planned “Fix” is to set up Edge browser to default to Epicor Kinetic (the thing they will use least) and put a shortcut to MES in Chrome.
Questions:
Does this plan seem reasonable? Or do others have a better way?
How do I access the “MES Link”? We did it once during an onboarding meeting a long time back, I created a shortcut in my browser but I think the link has more stuff in it than it needs. If I remember correctly there is an Easy Way to know the MES URL.
As for the rest of the plan, the Office MES answer would be either to customize Office MES to have a few of the screens you need or give them access to the normal screens they would use for those functions, you are correct Office MES is kind of stripped down but I believe that is because they have the full Epicor available to them (based on your security & groups, etc) so they would do those tasks in the main screens.
The real downside to this is that you then consume a full license instead of an MES license. There is some ability to add custom things to the normal MES but AFAIK things like Order Entry/Tracker would trigger the license to switch so not a good solution if that is the case.
If you could create a dashboard that could give them the information you can add that to MES and they could run it (TBH, I’ve not added dashboards but have added UD Screens so perhaps a UD screen might be a better option, or one that I know works at least).
When a MES license only user needs access to something only available in full Epicor, our usual solution is to add the needed app to MES. Any custom dashboard, and most out of the box dashboards can be added to MES if they are not there already. Sales Order Tracker is available from MES out of the box, for example.
Looking at MES, under the supervisor tab, Order Tracker is an option, since it is there you should be able to add it as button under one of the other areas and it should not consume an elevated license as I originally said (I still think Entry does but have not tested recently to confirm).
How familiar are you with customizing screens in Application Studio?
I have done a decent amount of Application Studio work, but I am far from an expert. Can I simply open the MES screen in Application Studio and basically borrow the Order Tracker button from the Supervisor tab and place it on the main tab?
Here is a list of allowed apps in MES. This list is from 10.2 so YMMV
The list of allowable programs in MES, from EpicCare.
Customer and Supplier Trackers cannot be accessed.
Which Epicor 10 programs can I launch from these MES buttons?
MES licenses are not full production license so you will not have free reign to add anything you want. You are limited to the following baseline UIs and Reports. In addition, any custom dashboard (Runtime or Assembly), crystal report, BAQ Report or UD table maybe launched from a button.
This is the list for 10.2
I’m not exactly sure what you mean when you say ‘borrow’ but I would create a new button in the area you want it, set it up identically (including creating any event if needed). You will also need to look into the row rules and use one of the buttons in the area you are in as a guide for when the button is disabled/enabled (employee logged in with access to that area).
Essentially it is the same process but MES lives in the Process Menu, not the Main Menu, if you do a Search through ALL in Menu Maintenance for Menu Description Like MES you should find it, from there you should just need to apply the customization like normal:
This is not working for me, we are SaaS so might be something with relation to that. Below is what I was creating based on this input. Obviously anything in {} is replaced with the actual.
OK got this deployed as far as I can for now. I found a URL that works for me, we will use that in the short term until we get this worked out.
Thanks for all your help.
If the URL ends with mode=MES then IIRC it will use a full license and not an MES one, in the before times the switch was /MES to the environment but in Browser it is mode=DC.
The other thing you can do is make it so that their user doesn’t have access to the Menu Items for anything other than MES (with context menus being the caveat):
So you’d go look up the security groups tied to each of these parent level menu IDs and then you’d create a security group for your MES users and make sure that group is “dissallowed” to see any of these.
Menu Security is another headache I have at the moment. We developed a webapp that we are integrating into Kinetic, that will list out things that need to be completed and it has a link to the Quote. I copied the formatting of a URL to the Opportunity/Quote Entry screen with the quote number embeded. However users with limited security access can’t access those links I know they have permission to the page as they can go there manually but whenever I test it through a link it prompts them to a login page. In the short term I am opening up their permissions but this is a pain.
They probably have access to a different menu item, and the menu ID is part of the URL. Use a menu everyone can access
Depending on how you make the URL, you might be able to make a function that looks up which menu item they have access to for the quote screen and dynamically generate the link to use that one…
Yeah I am heading down this path. Since I am only looking to send users to the Opportunity/Quote Entry page maybe I will create a new entry for it where I have more control and link to it in there.
What version of Epicor are you testing? Also are you running on a Linux container?
You can tell if you’re on Linux container in the Cloud Management Portal:
I know they have permission to the page as they can go there manually but whenever I test it through a link it prompts them to a login page. In the short term I am opening up their permissions but this is a pain.