My company is currently in the middle of an on-premise implementation of 10.2.7, and we have a need to enter data for certain operations on electronic components. Right now, after or during a testing operation an operator would fill out a table of recorded voltages/resistance/etc. on a paper traveler that would eventually be scanned into our current document management system. We would like to eliminate paper travelers in order to enforce labor transactions and gather true production standards for forward scheduling purposes, so we would like the operators to enter this data through the MES.
We have bought and been introduced to the Quality Module, but it seems like it would be a prohibitively large amount of work to come up with the probably hundreds of forms we would need to create in order to faithfully recreate the tables that need to be filled out for each part/revision/operation.
Right now our idea is to give the operators access to scanned PDF versions of these tables through the MES->Documents window, have them fill out the data there by tabbing through pre-defined text areas in the PDF files, and then have them upload these back to Epicor/Docstar (I should mention we have Docstar).
So we have a plan, which is a good start. Has anyone else tried anything like this? Any ideas or criticisms? Is there a better way to do this?
I’m interested in what kind of responses there are. Not sure I’ve seen a topic like this here before, but we’re in the same boat as you. Multiple tests during an operation. We were going to look at an updateable DB attached to a button where they could add rows to a UD table that would be associated with the operation they are currently logged in to (by looking it up via a query)
We have a similar requirement for attribute data related to inspection processes in an Electronics assembly plant. We added extra UD fields to the LaborDtl table for operators to add a summary at the End Activity. We then customised the MES End Activity screen to collect these in fields/grid. We tested it and it seemed to work okay, but haven’t put it into full production as yet.
We did the same for QA as the inspection plans were too rigid. It is an end activity customization that is going on a decade old that writes data to a UD table. Sean McDaniel wrote the first of it and @Chris_Conn helped move it to E10 and I recently changed it from vb to C. We have an updatable dashboard to fix any issues in the data collected.
