Are there any Rotomolding Companies on here using Epicor Kinetic?
Hi Holly,
Welcome! This is THE place for all community things in the Epicor world.
Would you mind sharing some details on a few key points?
- What is Rotomolding?
- Are you in the middle of a Kinetic implementation, shopping around?
- Key business process questions
Now I’m curious what Rotomolding is. 
Thank you!
- Rotomolding is Rotational Molding. This is the process of making plastic products by putting powder resin into a mold and baking it in a large oven while the mold is rotated to evenly distribute the powder within the mold. This is different than Injection Molding. Due to the type of manufacturer we are, our ERP needs a different than a normal manufacturing company. Our machines (ovens) are set up with multiple arms that can each hold multiple molds on each side. i.e. there may be 4 arms on a machine which can hold molds one each side making the number of sides for mold 8. In addition to that, depending on the size of the mold, multiple molds can be put on a side. Then you have to determine cook time, cool time and other parameters to be consider for each mold.
- We are 2 years into Epicor Kinetic. We implemented April 1, 2023. The scheduling program that came with our package does not work the way we need it to for rotational molding. In addition, the person that did the research and was our implementation leader, has moved on to another job and I have take his position as the Systems Accountant which is over our ERP system and making sure all our processes work properly and information is flowing through Epicor correctly to be reflected on our financials and inventory.
- The key question I have is what is the best scheduling program that Epicor has or integrates with that would be a good fit for rotational molding?
Probably a lot more than you wanted to know on rotational molding. 
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Welcome @HBunner! I hope that being thrown into the deep end like you were hasn’t been COMPLETELY discombobulating… please know that we’ll help as much as we all can.
I’ve never worked with rotational molding (I HAVE done a few injection molding implementations), but you and I and the rest of the herd can probably walk through enough of the Scheduling functionality to figure out something. First the Resource Groups and Resources…
- Ovens: are they functionally similar? Can any oven take any mold? Does the number of arms per oven vary?
- Arms: do some arms only fit in some ovens? Does the number of arms in a given oven at a given time vary by the molds attached to each arm?
- Molds: Is each mold unique to a part number, or can one mold make more than one part?
(hopefully I don’t sound like TOO much of a rookie yet).
Parts: do you (or can you) “group” your parts’ manufacturing by their cook/cure times? Is that one of the functionalities you’re looking for?
What other variables are important to you?
Knowing nothing more than you’ve posted so far, there are two additional modules that may be helpful in your environment (and you may well already have)… Advanced Planning and Scheduling (which allows Capabilities per Resource and allows more than 2 Resource constraints against operations) and Advanced Production Management (for Job Batching, which may or may not actually help but worth exploring). I am NOT trying to sell you software, but these are features that may be beneficial.
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For those interested, this is a decent video demonstrating and describing Rotational Molding.
I come from a plastics/polymer background. Plastics Engineering degree, have worked for an Injection Molder, polymer compounder (extrusion processes), and now work for an extruder manufacturer (capital equipment).
We’ve sold some extruders to roto-molders so they could custom color their materials in-house. Most will just add powdered color pigments to pulverized resins, blend, and its good. But we’ve had a couple customers want to pre-color the resins before pulverizing into the required dust.
Anyway… wow, scheduling in Epicor seems pretty crazy when you consider all the variables (watch the above video).
- Number of molds on a particular arm.
- Rotational factors (speeds) of the molds (at least I would assume different mold sizes would require different rotational speeds), so you would have to group like molds together.
- Oven temperatures and dwell times within the ovens.
- Various cooling methods (ambient, fans, misting, etc.) again would require specific grouping of parts.
- Polymer types (melt flow indexes) would have to be considered and grouped together.
@HBunner I’m sure you already have all those factors figured out as you’re doing this everyday… but trying to get Epicor to schedule based on all those things may be pretty daunting.
I wish I had more/better insight on scheduling within Epicor and whether it plays well with potential 3rd party schedulers that may be better suited.
I’m wondering (from a scheduling perspective) if this would be relatively similar to an injection molding schedule where Part Number XYZ123 requires mold ABC and press 32. BUT, you would also have to combine a “batching” schedule on top of that as you would be running multiple molds at a time through the same cycle.
That’s a very tough one! @Ernie and @Mark_Wonsil are experienced on the injection molding side… do either of you have experience with batch scheduling in Epicor?
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Have not. We have the situation where a single mold and machine a (or b, or c, …) produce two or more parts (co-parts), but they are related by the mold. It feels different than the arms, which feels more like a heat-treat oven. 
Hi Holly,
Yes, we are a Rotomolding company using Kinetic. We’ve tried working with multiple consultants and none have found a workable way to use Kinetic scheduling for our ovens.
We’ve recently added a third-party software that is designed specifically for rotomolding and have integrated it with Kinetic.
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Tell me more.
We are not rotomolding, we are film extrusion, but we are struggling with scheduling.
Rotoedge Pro is an application that was built to accomodate oven scheduling by a company that does rotomolding and then decided to become a software company too. It’s a web-based SaaS application. I’ve created Kinetic functions that Rotoedge can call to pull in jobs and then post job receipts or kanban entries as necessary as rotomolded parts are completed or scrapped.
Can you share what the third party software is and how it is working for you? How many ovens do you have?
We have looked at Rotoedge but were told it does not interface with Epicor. What company are you with?