Hello everyone — I am new to Epicor and looking to optimize our scheduling at the company I work for.
I’m seeking guidance and examples on how others structure the hierarchy between Operations, Resource Groups, Resources, and Capabilities, particularly when trying to reflect actual capacity constraints and improve schedule accuracy.
Our current state:
- There is effectively a 1-to-1 relationship between Operations and Resource Groups. For example, Operation Horizontal Machining is in Resource Group Horizontal Machine.
- Machines are not modeled as resources; instead, machines are implicitly represented by Resource Groups (and Operations), with labor resources allocated to those groups.
- Resources currently represent labor only (available people or labor pools) dedicated to a Resource Group or machine.
- Labor is often shared across multiple “machine” areas (Resource Groups) in reality, even though Epicor treats them as separate capacity buckets. In many cases, a machine does not have dedicated labor, but labor resources still need to be associated with it to provide at least some visibility.
- Capabilities are currently unused.
This structure works reasonably well for cost isolation and quoting but creates challenges for accurate scheduling.
My current thinking:
As a first step, I believe we want to decouple the 1-to-1 relationship between Operations and Resource Groups and instead broaden the scope of Resource Groups to represent true shared capacity pools, grouping machines and operations that share labor resources.
Follow-up steps could include:
- Modeling Machines as Resources
- Utilizing Capabilities for flexibility
- Further organizing People Resources
I’m particularly curious if anyone has a visual conceptual hierarchy or diagram showing how Resource Groups, Resources (People & Machine), Capabilities, and Operations relate to one another — even knowing it’s not one-size-fits-all.
Thanks in advance — I really appreciate the insight from this group!
