Three different approaches I’ve done:
A spreadsheet with data connections to help autofill entries that is picked up by service connect to create time entries. This was used primarily by engineering.
A customized MES simplifying the interface and eliminating most of the pop up windows. This is used in production with MES stations at every workstation.
Scanning travelers in a custom Xamarin app that runs on android or windows. This is my favorite approach if you already have job travelers. I would probably create two separate barcodes (or QR codes) on the traveler one to clock in and one to clock out. Then the app would scan them and make the REST call to Epicor.
Mainly because there is no easy way to centrally manage them with everything else and some of these windows boxes that can easily run Epicor native are so cheap it’s just not worth the hassle. With a Pi you still pay for it on the back end supporting it on an RDP server. You also have to be careful about how scans with special commands (like tab) work with a Pi RDP situation.
Oh for sure. For home automation projects, robotics, etc they are great. I’m partial to Arduino these days because there is no OS to worry about just straight bootloader/binary but they still have a place for sure when you want to do some multi-thread activities.
If there are a number of operations that are performed simultaneously, would it be worthwhile to talk with Engineering about how a given part’s BOO is structured?
“Well, but that’s the way we’ve always done it” is never a good reason to not change something…
We standardized on Minix Z83 boxes that seem the same cost as buying a refurb. ($308 CAD) They do not have a fan so no welding dust coming into the case from the floor. We put electrical tape over the open ports for added protection. We have had two become unusable (of the 32 deployed) over the 4 years we have been live but at the cost they are pretty expendable.
My one regret is that we went cheap with the Windows Home version which requires more hands on than I would like. For our latest location I am putting Windows pro.(the price above is the windows pro version).
We use RDP to connect all these. The canned install auto-logs on to windows and kicks off the RDP connection. If anything goes wrong we just reboot remotely.
I have not started the process of investigating Android devices for our handheld and look forward to other experiences with this. I got the price of the models suggested for the mobile warehouse and they are double and triple what we pay for our basic scanning guns (Unitech) They remind me of the Telxon units from the 90’s that cost $3,000+ each and then you see someone in the warehouse dropping one because they wanted to quit early on Friday!
@Graemer I’m glad you mentioned that, I was thinking about dust; our shop is VERY dirty. $199 USD on Newegg with Win Pro, apparently.
I’m curious why RDP. I’m not a hardware or networking person, so the reason may be obvious. (Client installation at upgrade time? I sure do hate that for the MES users especially.)
I’ll say, what blows me away at everyone’s responses is the fidelity to capturing the actual time people work on jobs. I was expecting most (at least some) of you to say “They are not worth it! Just guess!.” But no one did except @gpayne who said they got away from that.
Thanks again to everyone and their thoughtful responses.
I actually gave production an ez button for their BOOs. Engineering makes the detailed BOO for a standard job of X quantity. If a job is below X hours then it qualifies as ez and I take all of the operation time and sum it to the last operation and make the rest of them back flush.
The traveler and process instructions will always have all of the steps, but MES will not necessarily need to be entered on each one.
I also roll up any missed earned labor on completion of final audit, so they don’t lose them and throw of productivity tracking.
RDP allows us to install upgrades on the terminal server and avoids any issues of the shop floor people getting “upgrade” messages or IT having to visit the stations. We have remote service and manufacturing plants so anything we can do to avoid interrupting time collection the better. When we started down this road we did not want to give the staff an excuse to go back to the paper time cards.
We also found that having a UPS on one of the stations in each facility allowed the staff to end activity if there was a power failure.
Counterpoint the reason we avoided RDP is you have a single point of failure, or if client cache goes sideways you have to kick everyone out to fully clear it (caveat you could set configs to drop cache in alternate location for different groups so you wouldn’t have to kick EVERYONE out just group(s) at a time)
Obviously your setup works for you but we transitioned to having all staff on RDP a couple years ago. This was mainly to facilitate DR. Our RDP is in a farm with a controller and multiple terminal servers to reduce a single point of failure. These VMs can fail over to an alternate data centre if required.
We started out initially to only having RDP for our MES, handhelds and remote clients but many howls of poor response had us move some of the remote desktops to being direct installs and they did see an improvement is response. With our move to a new data centre 2 years ago we really worked hard on improving response on RDP and now this is used for all clients.
We did install the alternate cache as per the note on the support site. Downside of RDP is that it is very sensitive to network issues. Even though we have redundant WAN links we do have cases where people are kicked out on a network “blip” but the up side is their session is preserved and they do not lose data. Incidentally, I love this feature on RDP for scan guns because at my past job we could have the warehouse scanning 1,000’s of boxes from a container and then lose connection. With RDP it just picks up where it left off.
No doubt there are advantages to each at different scales, but if your company doesn’t have the need to go to that size, it’s not really worth the investment of that type of setup. I don’ t know the scale of Jason’s setup so I offered a counterpoint to RDP at my scale.
Please disregard. I get it now. Need to use the Application Server website not the EWA website. Although I am experiencing the login error others have mentioned.
@JasonMcD
I have read yours and others threads
Just scanned the six documents from Epicor on Kinetic.
I went out and bought a basic tablet - $50. Wanted to go very cheap…
