We are looking to have roaming QC inspectors track their labor hours as indirect, but would like to have them start/end activity on operations they are responsible for overseeing. In this case they would start/end activity in MES, but we do not want any labor hours or quantities to be logged. Part qty and labor hours will be accounted for by the machine operators. We would like to also account for logging folks that are shadowing/training in the same manner.
I’m thinking the answer may lie in the role and time type fields on the start production activity screen, but these are not currently active on my system (grayed out).
The easiest route would be to set their labor rates to zero. So, you’d still see hours, but no cost impact. Might work if you’re NEVER going to add their hourly cost to any jobs.
For apprentices/shadows, you’d just have to remember to give them a rate once their out on their own.
Thanks for the quick reply, David. I can’t say for sure that they will NEVER add hourly cost to a job. We occasionally use these folks for rework operations and the like where we would want to track the cost.
Well, I’m was wondering if you could assign various Role Codes to an Employee and approach it that way (like you originally mentioned) so I figured I’d test it out since Role Codes allow you to assign rates.
When you start a production activity, there’s a field to select a Role (like you said), but it is greyed out for me as well. I thought this was perhaps because I didn’t have any roles applied to my Employee record. So, I went into Employee Maint. and tried to add a role, so I could test, but when I click the “new” button on Role Codes… nothing happens. Dunno. These fields/functionality may be linked to a specific module that we haven’t purchased??
BUT… I’m wondering if a quick solution would be to create duplicate Employee records for these individuals, just giving them a different “ID”. ID’s a strings.
So, for example, my standard Employee ID could be my company clock number “999”. When I sign onto a job where I want to charge my time, I use that ID, and it will use my Employee Rate = $50/hr
When I sign onto a job where I DON’T want to charge my time, I use a different ID… “999X” (or whatever you want to dream up)… and it will use my Employee Rate = $0/hr.
One caveat here that I can think of would be if your Employee’s are also Users (in that they have Epicor UserID’s and passwords they have to use to log into MES). That would create a problem because you can only link 1 employ to a user account. So they couldn’t easily use both.
If you are set up that way… then you would also need a secondary USER account as well, for that to work. Then, they just have to remember to log-in with the secondary user account and Employee ID when you don’t want their rate applied to jobs.