My company is still living in a “paper world” and I am hoping someone might have some suggestions for me.
This is very much not related to Epicor, but I feel like some people could have some good advice or experience.
Our ECO’s are all on paper, we fill out ECO forms on paper, mark-up drawings on printed paper, get signatures from different departments on paper, then finally, we scan said paper and store them on our network AND keep the paper copy in a filing cabinet for some number of years.
I am really trying to move my company forward and get rid of all of this paper, but I don’t think we are ready for it to be integrated with an Epicor module just yet.
What I am looking for right now is maybe some third party program where I can mark-up submitted drawings and send back files with mark-ups and/or approvals.
This is mainly to enable some remote work and get rid of all of the unnecessary paper.
Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated!
Amber Strys
Sustaining Engineering Manager
Amber,
Without purchasing a document management system you can create network file folders for your company departments to share.
Can be customer and part based. Use your Epicor Customer Number and a serialized or internal part number that doesn’t change. Once you start linking you can’t change folder names down to that folder tree level.
Link you part folders to your parts, etc… Test for things like if your customer changes it’s name or part number will the link still work.
We do this currently then all the sub folders in the part file are similar to what each department keeps paper copies of such as Customer Print, Eng Change Notice, Operational Prints, Tool Drawings, Sales Purchase Order, Quality Certs, etc…
We process ECO’s by marking up a print and methods master then scanning it in the part folder. We create a Job to route to all areas and use MES to approve. It’s maybe a stretch for some companies to do it this way but it’s worked for us and maybe gives you some ideas of how to handle your situation.
Hope this helps.
Amber,
Another option would be to use several of Epicor’s tools together:
Engineering ECO’s… Engineering Workbench
ECO Workflow Groups
Tasks
Document Management
You can create a Document Type exclusively for ECO’s and any scanned or marked up documents can be drag n dropped on the new ECO. Make the Storage Type ‘File System Document’ so anything attached will be saved to a common storage location you setup in Company Maintenance.
ECO’s can be setup with ECO Workflow Groups, default task set (steps) & members.
With a Data Directive on the Task table, email notifications can be sent to the assigned user so they can review the ECO and it’s attachment and then approve or not.
Then at one of the tasks/milestones the appropriate person would check out the part Rev, make the changes and get approval and checkin.
The setup takes some thought, study and patience, but once you get it, it can work pretty well.
Another cheap online tool that might work and would help you better explore the process before trying to construct it in Epiocr is KissFlow.com
There is a paragraph in this article on using KissFlow and Google Docs do do what you describe: