We currently have a job on the floor with a production quantity of 200,000. After the sub-contract operation, we are assigning Serial Numbers to the Job, 300 at a time. We are currently using DMT for the assignment which takes 5-6 minutes to complete.
Management is asking if the 5-6 minutes can be approved upon. DMT is currently being launched at one of our remote sites, so it is traveling over our WAN to reach our Epicor servers. I performed the same import at headquarters where the servers are located and the DMT processing time was the same.
We are wondering how other companies are handling Serial Number Assignment with larger quantities. Are you using DMT as well? Service Connect? Something else? What are your quantities and processing times for your process?
Did the “300 at a time” come about as that is how many come back from the outside op? If so, split that into 3 separate uploads of 100 each and run them simultaneously, see if that runs more quickly. Then try 6 separate uploads of 50 each and see what that does.
Another option, just thinking outside the box, would be to not use DMT at all, but just run the Serial Number Assignment program just before you leave the night before. It will only assign the entire production quantity of Serial Numbers, you can’t change that, but you’ll be home eating dinner.
I was told the 300 at a time are ‘the amount that fits on a cart’ once they are boxed. We do not get the entire production quantity at the same time, and we do not get an electronic copy of the SN’s for the units coming from the subcontractor.
The remote site did a test earlier where they have 3 instances of DMT open, each with 300 SN’s ready to import. All 3 were started at the same time and they were all finished within 7 minutes and 30 seconds.
The “Serial Number Assignment” DMT template is a bear… one record per job/assembly and the Serial Numbers themselves in a single tilde-delimited field. What a pain. If you can get 900 serial numbers uploaded in 7-1/2 minutes with simultaneous DMT instances (effectively 120 records per minute), it’s probably not going to get better than that. You can try adding more instances and see what that does. As you discovered, you get a slight slowdown with each additional instance, and there will likely be a significant performance hit at some point… find that point and don’t get bigger than that, but I think you’re as fast as you can get in your environment.
I’m going to bump this back to the top to see if anyone else can provide some insight in the Serial Number Assignment process itself. I believe Ernie is correct that I can’t get any faster for my environment until our new hardware is up and running, and even then there are no guarantees.
I’m more interested in everything Serial Number Assignment process does when executed. I’ve been told by support in the past when unassigning SN’s that various records are locked to prevent corruption. Is the same thing happening during assignment? I would like to be able to tell management that X, Y, and Z are happening during assignment, all of which are necessary, and the 7-1/2 minutes for 900 via DMT is reasonable.