We have a ton of jobs logged into a department which were never ended properly so they are just sitting there, backing up MES. As a result of this backup, MES is ridiculously slow to load to the point where a worker cant even enter/end an activity. I can go in and individually end activity on these jobs but because its so slow, ending one means i have to wait a minute or two to end the next one. Multiply this by the number of jobs we have and im looking at over an hour just ending activities. Is there a way i can use DMT ( or another method) to end x amount of operations at once? For the record, we know these jobs are out of the department 100% so there is no worry there. i dont want to close the jobs as some are still running and having closed jobs in MES adds to the wasted time.
You can write a customization or BPM to do it… but there is no built in way otherwise.
I recommend write a BAQ, using the Updatable BAQ functionality to write the UBAQ BPM to Clock each of the jobs out.
Joe,
End Activity is basically a labor transaction. The Labor Detail table is part of DMT, so you may want to try it there. It may be possible.
Also, anytime someone clocks in, it creates a Labor Header record and ALL the labor they record will go under that Labor Header. If your employees are not used to clocking out (and it’s easy to close without clocking out), that will have the effect that you’re seeing on your system as well. Every time a user does anything in MES, it looks for open transactions under that “clockin”. If you’ve got a couple LaborDtl child records, it’s pretty quick. If people don’t clock out and they’ve got two years of transactions under the one LaborHed record - it gets really slow.
Kevin Simon
SimsTrak Consulting, LLC
I too would be interest to hear what other people are doing relating to end activity and clocking off if an employee has actually ended their shift. We have a lot of factory employees and they do forget which adds labour to jobs we don’t want. We reverse erroneous transaction which is time consuming but we want the $ and time to be reasonably accurate. What have you guys implemented and can I please have a copy of what you did. Thanks in advance
I’ve done various things with various clients, including automation. About the best thing I’ve found was simple. We put together a report that showed open labor transactions and grouped by supervisor. Then, the supervisor was the one who had to go into Time & Expense Entry and close off the transactions. They are the ones with the power to beat on the employees who aren’t clocking off.
Anything that is automated just reinforces the bad behavior by the employees.
Kevin
What about the Conversion Workbench? User Run conversions 1130 and 1160 are “End Activity on Active Labor Transactions” and “End Activity on Labor Header Transactions,” respectively. They launch a form where you search for and choose the activities you want to end/the employees you want to clock out.
I have created customizations in MES that will list all running jobs. The operator can log into multiple (multi-select from list) jobs with one click. I do a similar thing with reporting scrap. That process creates a labor record, adds scrap, then ends it. I don’t see why you couldn’t just list all jobs that have an active trans, list them, then select the ones you want to end and have it do it all at once. Do you have any entry requirements qty/scrap when you end activity?
we have essentially two types of end activity… a labour transaction and a subassembly completion. The labour transaction are the trouble some types as users are supposed to close active labour transactions at the end of their shift and clock out, there is no qty or scrap entered for these. The subassembly completions are where they enter the qty completed, this is not capturing time (qty only operation) and is generally a start production activity end activity, ie less than 30 second in total.