Often there has been discussion on “Auto Clock out of MES employees”… this has been problematic in the past because people sometimes just mark the person “off the clock” without stopping all activity.
How useful would it be to have an Automation Studio recipe that would clock out an employee WHILE ALSO stopping all activity.
ALSO, this could be made to automatically choose the employees Shift End TIME OF DAY if they forget to clock out. This could be schedule to run at the end of the day.
Alternately it could be triggered by sending an EMAIL or a WEBHOOK that would have the employees ID and then the recipe would do the work.
Thinking that this would be a multi-part recipe:
part 1, a “function” recipe that would have as it’s inputs, the Employee ID, and the function would automatically clock out the individual.
part 2, a SCHEDULED recipe that would scan for all employees who are not clocked out at the end of the day, and clock them out using the Part 1 recipe
Part 3, a Webhook recipe (or email trigger recipe) that would allow for remote control of clocking out. It would also use Part 1 above.
Yes I think something like this is needed, but imo it should be part of base epicor. It seems like there’s a trend to put basic functionality in add-on modules instead of improving core Epicor. Dealing with people who forget to clock out is a problem for everyone who uses MES, and has nothing to do with external integrations. This is the type of thing that most people who are new to Epicor can’t believe there isn’t already a built-in way to handle it.
The problem with that idea is that end activity requires inputs. How many you finished etc. So automatically closing out of all of them is problematic, because you know what you should type for some of those fields.
The same thing with auto clocking out at the end of the day. If someone is working a couple of hours of overtime at the end of the shift, and it clocks them out, best case, someone has to go in and fix the record, worst case, someone get screwed out of pay.
Every time someone brings this up, as soon as the details on the exceptions are talked about, the logic fails.
I agree making it fully automated isn’t realistic. But having a built-in updateable dashboard for the shop supervisors to review/correct the entries would be great.
I wrote a function that runs every hour on the hour. What it does is, checks if the person has been clocked in for 2 hour or more, over their scheduled shift total hours (IE if they have an 8 hour shift and are in for 10). If they are 2 hour or more past their shift length it auto clocks out and flags their record as a missed punch. This lets our supervisor staff know they need to review that punch. I also auto clock them out of activities if they are still in any and those are also flagged for review.
Totally agree… which is why thay would need reviewed… if any system auto stops the job, it would need to make assumptions like “zero finished” and that they worked till the end of the day, both of which are probably wrong.
The system does have checks in place for the supervisor to see who is clocked in (shop tracker)… BUT I have found that Supervisors tend to leave at the same time as their employees, and never check till the next day… the challenge is that there are about as may ways to solve this problem as there are companies running the software. In fact, there are LEGAL ramifications in some states, where you are not allowed to have anyone other than the employee “touch” or modify their timecard (MES is an electronic timecard) without tracking of those changes. One nice thing about having an easy to tweak automation is that these “rules” can be adjusted from one company to another.
I’m going to stay old school here and say if you are going to automatically clock your employees off jobs, then why even have them report labor to start with…