And what’s the timeframe @timshuwy?
It took me until Hally comment to understand what this comment meant and to recognize that you are an Epicor employee. I echo her question though is there a timeline for this improvement?
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@Hally & @evilearscat (Yes, I am an Epicor Employee… my title is “Distinguished Product Manager”, and i manage the core functionality of KInetic)…
Our HOPE is to have something announced before 2025.2 is released.. we are in contract negotiations right now, and therefore I cannot reveal the product name at this time. We have an internal due date to make a decision that is middle of september. there are not current plans to extend this deadline, but that might happen if we are still negotiating.
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I’m going to give a ditto to @Banderson - I’ve done it this same way for years. I usually have a BPM that drops a text file into a drop folder. Any logic on what to print is easily done in the BPM. Technically, Bartender doesn’t integrate with Epicor - it simply prints the data in the text file - doesn’t care whether it comes from Epicor or if you created it in Notepad. I’ve found when you keep it simple, Bartender works pretty flawlessly.
The benefit to using Bartender versus a printed report out of Epicor is it’s pretty immediate. If you print labels using SSRS for example, the same delay you see when doing a print preview is what the user sees when they print the labels. In a fast paced production environment, I prefer the labels to kick out pretty much immediately when they click the button, versus a short delay of perhaps just a second or two.
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This is for sure a big one. Especially for on production line printing it needs to be real snappy!
Nice thing about drop files too is you can drop a 1kb file over the WAN to a remote site running BarTender and then the potentially 100’s of MB of image files are generated and printed locally.
Nice thing about what Tim is suggesting is that we could reduce the number of BarTender printers we have by a fair amount, but it couldn’t go away entirely.
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Thank you for advocating this Mark.
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I have not used Nicelabel - but thoughts / ideas since we just finished up labeling bins, machines, etc. in our locations.
- Keep your bin layouts simple - start small especially if your users are not use to scanners or moving product yet.
- Determine Licensing Bartender vs Nicelabel - Bartender licenses by Printer and not concurrent user.
- Since we are on-premise - I created a SQL views - Part,Desc, etc. then other views that list active Bins - options also have excel file with the master list that Bartender or Nicelabel if able to link / pull data from the file so that your labels can be locked down - no one can change the template.
Hope that helps
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Hi @timshuwy , are you saying all of SSRS will be replaced with some other report technology, or just speaking to its use for printing labels? We’re relying on DataWorks Bar 39 font to print compatible labels on SSRS reports, but could really use Code 128 support within SSRS. I thought I heard Code 128 support in SSRS was available with SaaS today, is that true?
^^this. They have a new product that will replace SSRS. (maybe someday…)
Yes, because SSRS is being deprecated by Microsoft, we need to provide a better solution.We have found one that supports many different barcodes (without needing to install “fonts” to print them). It also support QR Codes as well, which cannot be done with a font.
Announcement date is “coming soon” (
Safe Harbor )
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Great, thank you!
It can be done with a font if you’re on-prem. ID Automation for example has a SSRS integration for QR codes. Along with most of the other symbologies they have font encoders for.
A newer modern solution though would be nice. A web-based reporting tool that can output multiple formats.
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