We do use MES to start, stop labor, & report qty. But the people working in the work centers don’t move parts. The stock chaser does the moving to the next work center in rack.
Our goal of prioritizing work in a work center requires us to know what’s physically in the work center, so we can filter a company wide job priority list by the work center.
With the crazy mix of parts we deal with, it’s not unusual for parts to arrive in a work center 5 minutes ago, that has higher priority than what’s what’s being worked on, & what may have been on the in rack for days.
It’s not possible for us to FIFO work through a work center.
The CEO wants to know if the hottest jobs in the plant are being worked on.
Department heads want to know if the hottest jobs in the department are being worked on.
The workers want to know what the hottest job in their work center is, so they don’t get caught with that hot potato.
We have a customer who just went live with Advanced Material Management and the Kinetic App on the Handheld. To transfer inventory, users scan the QR code on the inventory label, move the product to the bin, which is either another inventory location or an Input Bin of a Resource, and scan the QR code of the laminated card at that Bin. The QR code is the PCID. When the job operation is complete, a similar process transfers the inventory from the Output Bin of the Resource to either a new Inventory location or the Input Bin of the next job. It is rather elegant.
Thanks to those who have chimed in so far.
I understand that WIP bins are a valid way of tracking job location.
I just don’t want to suffer the complication of creating hundreds of bins, making tens of thousands of inventory transactions a year, granting the permissions to all the people that need to perform the transactions, blaa, blaa, blaa …
To refocus the original ask.
I’m now thinking of a Custom MES button.
When this custom button is clicked, a dashboard opens with a blank text box for the Job Number, a blank text box for a Location, an Update button, & a Close button.
The blinking cursor should be in the Job Number text box.
If I read a bar code, or type something manually into the Job Number text box & hit tab, the Job Header table is queried for an open job with the same job number.
If a job doesn’t exist, throw up a dialog box that says “No such open job.”
If a job exists, move the cursor to the Location text box.
Type or barcode read the Location into the location text box.
Click the Update button to write the text from the location text box into a UD field in the job header table. This should also clear the text boxes & put the cursor back into the Job Number text box, making it ready to accept another input.
Click close to close out the dashboard.
… I need an Epicor Table a BAQ can access.The table must have columns for Job Number, Location, & probably a date/time field, so I can find the latest or last transaction.
Re this table you are looking for, I think you want PartWIP. And really, I see that you’re looking for a fast way to use the Move WIP program. Though that is assuming you have AMM, which isn’t clear in this thread?