Scheduling a Paint Line

Epicor ERP 10
1

Is anyone scheduling an automated powder coat paint line and if so how are you handling your racking which is a constraint. I have a set number of racks per part with a standard configuration. Ex. Hood. 3 hoods can hang on a rack and I have 200 racks so I can run a max of 600 parts.

I am thinking of just setting it up as a material requirement for the BOM so they know what rack to pull. It will be a non stock item so there is no material transaction involved .

For planning my Multiples of the part would be set to 3 with a min of 3 and a max of 600
This is fine if only one color was being run but what happens when I have multiple jobs for the same part but different colors that each cap out for the 600 pcs. I cant start them until racks are available and I also dont need to wait for the total of all the racks to be available, I can overlap.

If I set the racks up as resources how would the job know that I need one for every 3 parts on the job. Also how would the next job know when the racks are available? I dont have to wait for all the racks to run through the paint line to start the next color, as soon as the rack is unloaded it can start cycling again.

I am thinking along these lines that My resource Paint line will have a total Daily production Capacity of say 1200 racks and each method will have a production consumption rate that matches the hanging pattern, so If 3 parts are hung on a rack consumption rate is .333333 per part. The good thing here is that the speed of the line is the worst case scenario for the paint application.

Can anyone share how they setup Epicor 10 for a paint line to be able to use scheduling properly.

Thanks

2

I’m hoping someone will respond because we have a similar situation where we aren’t yet able to schedule but we want to.

Ours is a manual powder-coating process for small components. We deal with one of the bottlenecks by holding the parts in their handling trays as a separate SKU, which means they are already a collection of items to be handled as one. But sets of trays then go into an oven for a fixed time period, and it might be several jobs sharing that time or only part of a single job. So far nobody has come up with a way of dealing with that. It would be nice to think that if someone has a good answer for your situation it might lead to one for ours too.

4

I think you’re on the right track. I would set your concurrent capacity to 1200 rather than your daily capacity. This will force the scheduling engine to to keep no more than 1200 “rack spots” consumed at any given time.

5

Thanks I will try that

Jeanne Hartmann

Epicor Anaylst

Jones Plastic & Engineering
2410 Plantside Drive
Jeffersontown, KY 40299

502-379-8239 (Direct Line)

269-806-7793 (Cell)

jhartmann@jonesplastic.com