Good morning all!
I was wondering if anyone has had the pleasure of implementing Wireless Warehouse with BLE. (Bluetooth Low Energy) Does anyone have any recommendations on implementation? I would love to have a conversation if anyone has availability.
Hello,
I work for Biscit the makers of EKW and have implemented EKW (Epicor Kinetic Warehouse, formerly Wireless Warehouse) for hundreds of customers. I’ve never had anyone ask this question. It’s my understanding that BLE is simply the way the device uses Bluetooth to transfer data. In my experience, companies either use WIFI or Cell service to connect. When working with the handheld, EKW is directly reporting information to Epicor. When thinking about things you can connect a device to via Bluetooth, such as printers or scales, there’s a common misconception that your handheld talks directly to the peripheral devices. When talking about EKW, EKW is talking to Epicor only, so those peripherals must be connected to Epicor.
I’m interested in understanding more about how you are hoping to use BLE.
Maybe for mobile printing? We’re in the beginning stages of implementing EKW, but we purchased a mobile printer that connects to the EKW handheld via BT.
Printing is handled mostly by Epicor (back end). We use wireless printers as well but we use WIFI instead of bluetooth.
I’ve often wondered about using BLE Beacons to get location in the plant in order to pick the closest printer. 
While you may connect devices like the handheld and cell phones to a Bluetooth printer. When using EKW, the handheld is not doing the printing, Epicor is. EKW doesn’t really invent functionality for Epicor, it just puts the power of Epicor in your hands and increases efficiency and decreases human error with the introduction of barcode scanning.
In our case, we build airplanes. We are wanting to track tooling. (Think of tooling as giant molds for plane parts) We want to be able to track where they are in the warehouses.
Another use case is tracking parts bins that need to be replenished by moving an empty bin with a tag to a designated location.
We want to track high dollar inventory wherever it may be. Think propellers, tools/molds, or even where an entire plane is throughout the warehouse or plant.
Hope that makes sense. I want to get a lot of input in on this. Anything would be greatly appreciated.
I made a reply on Marks comment that will explain things a lot more of what we are trying to do.
I’ve worked with folks who did some interesting things with RFID using automation studio to track WIP/FG through their assembly line. I would guess beacons could be used in a similar way, although their use of RFID didn’t really interact with EKW. I wasn’t part of the implementation of that RFID solution, so I only saw the end results which were centered on backflush logic. When thinking about what EKW offers, it reads barcodes and uses those to process transactions.
If you haven’t already, look into Automation Studio. I would think you could use BLE devices to trigger some action in Epicor based on a movement, for example, when the part moves from a specific location in the warehouse, trigger an inventory move in Epicor.
BLE is a technology that requires a battery source, and active RFID tags do too. However, passive RFID tags do not require a battery source. Both technologies send signals “Here I am!” RFID tags can be applied to just about anything (tools and fixtures, employee badges, job travelers, raw materials, reusable totes, etc.) and tracked and located by overhead readers, robots, and drones as well as by users with handheld readers. These technologies are digital twins, virtual representation what is happening in the physical space. With the digital twin data, all kinds of new things are possible - automatic alerts, automatic labor collection, automatic cycle counts, etc. Everything is in real-time.
For tracking the location of mobile BINs, you may want to consider utilizing Warehouse Zones.
Set up Warehouse Zones for specific areas of your WH and then use an updateable dashboard to update the Zone of the BIN being moved.
I am wondering how Epicor handles Post requests through the API. We want to receive part location into Kinetic from a vendor that already has the capability to track location of parts.
A client implemented AssetWorx for inventory location tracking. It wasn’t with Epicor, but I did the integration. Their API is nice and it’d work well with Epicor AppStudio. You could easily embed their floor plans maps into an AppStudio page and trigger move transactions from active tag movements.
Not sure about EKW, but I’d assume a rfid reader would act just like a BC reader as far as assigning tagID to your ERP transaction.
assetworks has a free mobile app for iOS/android. There are probably plenty of similar solutions. Another nice thing about this one is their active tags form a mesh network so fewer readers need be installed in the rafters. They also have a wide range of tag options so you can track everything from small parts passively, to large parts actively, to people to fleets using gps.
From all the posts above, “getting” the data isn’t really a conceptual challenge (a physical challenge to some extent). What’s more likely to be the hard part is how do you want to process/see/use that data once you get it? For something like this, define the output you’re looking for, which will then point you to what inputs are required. From those you can develop the process to get to where you need to be.