Have any of my Epicor E10 brothers (and sisters) integrated Epicor with any of PLC devices in their production machines? Without using Mattec? We are looking to get our feet wet on getting production and scrap counts from our machines, and posting these transactions to Epicor. We currently use the Epicor MES solution to record this information, but are looking to streamline by removing the employees from the redundant efforts of recording the production.
We’ve seen the Mattec product, but it is quite pricy. Wondering if anyone has gone down this path with other products.
There are a couple of companies here that have done some serious home-grown cool-ness by tying it all together. A most impressive setup can be found with @jgiese.wci !!
We are currently in a similar situation to you. Our guys are doing all of our PLC upgrades now (taking 2 years almost) in order to collect the additional data. Our plan is to push it into it’s own ProdData DB for analysis by the production folks, the maintenance folks, and to extract entries for quality/etc. in ERP.
I thought about the IoT path and Azure and alternatives (we have machines in the UK and Holland as well), but we just don’t have that much data that we couldn’t do it ourselves on the cheap.
I’ve not gotten to the entries in ERP yet, so I’m curious what your direction is.
We are currently working on bringing Epicor and PLC data together to create OEE dashboards.
This is generated from aggregate data pushed from Ignition (our SCADA package) to UD02 and then joined with LaborDtl and Resource data.
Epicor EFX for the Rest calls from Inductive to sync data to Epicor. In there you do all the data mapping.
BPMs that call Rest endpoints in Ignition to sync data to Ignition
A fairly straight forward setup and gets the job done. I did an Insights presentation on it a few years ago. Not sure where the copy of that presentation is at this point but I’m sure @hkeric.wci the horder of all has a copy.
Not really… Mattec you are paying for those professionals to do the whole enchilada if you are looking for something cheaper you have to figure it out on your own, or really understand the scope of it to communicate it to multiple different vendors.
You would need someone to do Industrial Engineering on what sensors you need for the data you seek.
You would need someone to handle the SCADA part which could be the same company as above but may not be.
You would need someone to do the integration between both Epicor and SCADA which for sure would be neither of the above.
I’m UK based and at my last company I was responsible for both SCADA and Epicor. Another person looked after PLC programming so we worked together to get some integrations working. We were sending Epicor jobs to the HMI for selection by the operator, then reading batch process information back into Epicor.
I now work as an ERP consultant - I’ve just sent you an email, as you’re already a customer of my current employer .
We are currently working on a Panasonic integration which will uses the Rest API to call functions that generate things like inventory transfers and job material usages.
This is based on actual usages from the production machines rather than the previous solution of backflush, giving us more accuracy.
Depending on what data your production machines can generate, you could look at a less sophisticated solution involving outputting the data into a flat file and generating the stock transactions using a combination of Powershell and DMT.
)
