System Status Screen

Kinetic ERP
1

I’m thinking of making an Epicor System Status screen that we can display on screens around our shop/office. So it’s obvious if there is a bottleneck or other problem somewhere in our business pipeline. With simple green lights/numbers for everything working and red lights to indicate something is wrong. So a grid of say 30 indicators for each department and/or part of the process. For example

  • Revisions stuck in EWB
  • Items on jobs not ordered yet
  • POs submitted but unconfirmed for more than 2 days.
  • Arrived not Recieved for more than a day
  • Operations that should be started but not
  • Orders on hold more than a week
  • Shipped Not Invoiced for more than a day

And then if looking at this web page/screen on a PC, you could click on the box and it would take you to a dashboard or other appropriate screen to see details.

So my question - Anyone else doing something similar? What platform would yall suggest I look at? Or is there a built in Epicor screen that already can do this, that I haven’t run across yet?

If doing from scratch I’d be using BAQs/REST and a handbuilt webpage. I’m leaning this way but would want to find a good, easy to use function library.

Something similar to these, but not just for production.

There are a thousand of these on Google, though most of them are way too complicated… and I don’t want an entire system, just a web page.

Thanks in advance.

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We use Grafana for this. As of v10 which we finally got to last Friday they have some sweet very mature JSON data sources and a new canvas feature for arbitrary object placement, like a shop floor map with status indicators sort of thing.

Really your decision will come down to what kinds of data sources you need to connect to and how easy are those to use.

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I can second Grafana with API feeding it data. Grafana is nice to use and it was free!

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Wow ok thanks much! And it looks perfect, very easy to customize look. Only data source should be Epicor… though now yall have me thinking.

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Followup question - for those of you using Grafana, do you get data from BAQs/REST, or connect Grafana directly to Epicor database and make queries in Grafana?

I see advantages either way… is there something that makes one method way better than another?

Here we are discussing both, with warning about directly querying database:

Here are both again.

I guess I’ll start with BAQs and move to queries if needed.

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I used API key and restricted Access scope to just the BAQ that was needed. I think I used a generic odata as the source.

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Depends on the situation for us, these days, but historically for Epicor we used the Direct SQL Drive and hit a read only version of the database. Not ideal but it’s where we were able to start. Since then a much better support for simple JSON has been implemented so going to calling BAQs via REST vs Direct SQL is viable.

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