The way I look at MES is that it is intended to provide shop floor access to many, from a few Kinetic user accounts. My intent, in deploying MES, is to have MES workstation user accounts (i.e., MES1, MES2, and so on) but through the settings on the Employee Maintenance record, define who has access, and what access the users have. I have discovered that I need a user security group for “MES Workstations” and that I need to assign that security group to all the various menus/forms that MES will be expected to access. So far, so good.
The problem I am having is tying the transaction back not only to the user (MES1), but to the specific employee making the transaction. The Entry Person field ties back to the user account logged in on the workstation. but does not appear to further link the employee that is logged into MES in the transaction record.
Has anyone out there in Kinetic MES-land figured out a way to tie the Employee to the transaction? If so, please share.
Receipt Entry, Inventory Transfer (all the material handling transactions), Report Quantity. Basically all of them. If the Many Employees to Few Users is the intent, the transaction must be tied to the Employee first and foremost.
Part tran gets filled in with the employee ID if the logged in user is associated with an employee but it doesn’t work if you are using a generic user account.
We have our Epicor MES setup so that each user logs in using their employee number. We define access on their user accounts. They can clock into and out of jobs, in some cases enter production etc. It also allows a supervisor to see whomever they are overseeing and see which resource they are actively using, as well as seeing when an employee is not clocked into a job. We are trying to capture actuals in some areas where their employee rate is pulled into the job labor. However in our case there is another department where we are doing the opposite. We are back flushing using a phantom employee (with its own applicable labor rate which is the average rate).
So each employee that needs access will log into their jobs - either indirect, or direct labor under their employee number and that information will come through on any transaction they perform. This is also useful for capturing employee efficiency as well as resource group efficiency. You can also print preview the production detail report and view everything related, both material as well as labor transactions including downtime.
I’m actually in the process of attempting to create a BAQ for our directors so they can can see every operation, on every resource, in any resource group, and employee efficiency (it will be difficult to make this work… so I may have to bring in a third party for help working this out) if anyone has a tip let a brother know!