We’ve had a couple of line down situations recently, and I’d like to start quantifying how often this happens(don’t need to track every hiccup, just major line down ones), for how long it lasts and what the cause/solution was(we don’t have the advanced quality module). We’re a small company and I don’t want to go overboard with this…
Does Epicor offer a solution for this and / or does anyone have any advice on how you track this type of a thing in your production environment(what is measured is improved)?
We use MES for this. With MES operators can record all kinds of information about what is going on with the machine they are operating like production, setup, etc.
If you decide to go this route you will see a big shiny ‘Downtime’ button. Stay away from this because it doesn’t work the way you think it does/want it to.
We use indirect activities to record things like downtime. Indirect Activities can be user created, so you can use them to track anything you like.
Like @hackaphreaka said, indirect activities are a good way to track downtime, since if you already use MES, operators are familiar with logging in and out.
The tricky part can be determining when to start capturing the event. What may start out as a “hiccup” (i.e. don’t start an inactive activity) may turn into a major issue, and you lose the initial downtime (unless you later go and edit the record). Key is to have defined the criteria for when to start the inactive activity so everyone is doing it consistently.
I’ve had customers range from having a single “downtime” inactive activity to having as many as a dozen types of downtime (“Downtime - power”, “Downtime - maintenance”, etc.). I advise them to only set up as many as they would take different actions to resolve, similar to setting up reason codes elsewhere. If you have too many the users will pick something on the visible list and not scroll down.