I’ve been asked by some members of our senior staff why we haven’t incorporated barcoding and scanning as part of our standard Epicor processes. My response has always been that, since we don’t do lot tracking/serializing or have multiple bin locations, our receiving and issuing processes are largely automated by using Mass Receipts and Backflushing.
The only opportunity in this area I can think of is with PO receipts since our PO’s are often 50+ lines and suppliers often ship partials. But this would require us to ask our suppliers to incorporate barcodes of PO/Line/Release and Ship Qty on their packing lists which is hardly a trivial request.
Depending on the load you might have in different areas, I’d like to bring a few areas into your attention:
1- Shipping (sending packages)
2- Inventory keeping (you can have barcodes and hand-held scanners with AMM-Advance Material Management)
3- Job# scanning and material transactions
We use barcodes for these, I think you can use them somehow as well.
Ditto. We even bought the handhelds. After 3 years it went nowhere. We’ve even had BarTender licenses for 5 years now.
Our problem is organization. We don’t adhere to process very well in the manufacturing division, and people change things around (physically and in concept) all the time.
Silver lining is that last week we actually started using the handhelds in our other site (a pure warehouse; not a job shop). Not with barcodes yet but the EKW app. I can see them using barcodes and succeeding.
Manufacturing is borderline unwieldy. There is so much process to think through with WIP, and “barcoding” that is not a technology challenge so much as a process one.
Other thing is that picking an order is not as easy as you might think… (I am still working on that.)
I was just saying that our warehouses will probably be more inclined to make use of barcodes, but mfg job shop will be tougher, I don’t know how much efficiency gain we will get from it unless we change our process.
We use the EMWW app for all material transactions and we use PCID and Lot Tracking.
Receiving is done in Epicor, we use material moves in EMWW to put away from the dock.
We use fulfillment workbench to release orders, picking though EMWW. Use Outbound orders or My Outbound orders.
Job materials are released through fulfillment workbench, picked via EMWW.
Job Receipt to inventory is used to put away finish goods from jobs.
We use EMWW to clock in and out of jobs as well.
The material queue manager helps organize all of this. We assign the material picks for shipping and jobs to material handlers. We do not use MES, just EMWW with a mix of devices, CK65 and a few Honeywell and Samsung tablets.
Each pallet has PCID label with a barcode for the PCID, we scan that barcode into the transaction screens.
We still print job travelers with attachments and use a multi field barcode for starting activity. the emww app has a global option for a field separator and settings on multi field scanning.
EMWW (or whatever they named it this week) works great on the tablets, resizes nicely.
You can demo the app with your Education database on any android device. it’s in the play store or download the APK from biscit, license required for the biscit download page.
We also use the handhelds for inventory counts, the Cycle Count Ext is pretty slick.
We also have been playing around with barcodes and mobile devices (surface pro right now) over the past year. So far, only for inventory transfers and inventory info. They (shop floor) wanted a version of our “Bin Quantity on Hand” dashboard on the MES, which lists all company locations/warehouses/bins for a scanned part number. I have my fingers crossed this will be a useful one for them. So far, I can’t really say we’ve gotten a good embrace on it nor gain in efficiency. But we already own the MES program and the devices aren’t that much $, so we figure it moves us in the right direction for eventually getting a win.
We also do many monthly receipts from our parent company. We have a list of what’s to be received. I think I’m going to put our barcodes on that list to see if workers like that. This way we are using a list that’s already created by someone and not needing to ask a vendor to do it.