We have…
~5 Resource Groups.
~2 CNC’s in each Group.
~All Parts that run through any of the Groups require both CNC’s to complete processing.
~Not all CNC’s are identical, so there will be some parts that will need to be directed to 2/5, 3/5, etc of the Resource Groups.
We were initially thinking of Creating a Capability attached to the Machines and then loading twice as two detail steps, but theoretically the system could schedule to two CNC’s in different groups.
My final thought was to represent each of the sets of CNC’s as One Machine in Epicor (since they are run together). This solves the risk of scheduling two machines in different groups. However, we use the Maintenance Module, so it would break the individual link between the ResourceID and the Maintenance Machine.
Any other thoughts? Some functionality, or technique, I am missing?
We do something similar. We have 2 and 4 machine clusters that Epicor sees as one machine each.
We thought about the capability thing and found the same issue - cross scheduling against the clusters.
As for maintenance - Equip and Resource have a link but only for schedule blocking, but you can always have more Equipment than Resources. If you run both all the time, then the PM should be for both all the time (generally) and therefore blocking the schedule for PM-ing the one resource will give you time on both pieces of equipment. And if you want to track the individual costs (cost of ownership), then you can either calculate twice the cost, or do a secondary PM manually for the other piece of equip and issue time/materials to it.
We’ve talked about it but haven’t gotten there yet on that last part.