Maintenance Module Request Queue and Repair Jobs

Epicor ERP 10
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We have implemented PM jobs for 1 department in our plant and it’s going well so far. Some are calendar-based and some are meter-based plans. We have the Maintenance Plan Processor job running nightly to create new PM jobs. Since these types of jobs are planned (not break/fix jobs), it’s not a problem for our Maintenance Planner to review these jobs daily, issue any parts needed, engineer, and then release them during the day. Even if this process is delayed by a day, it’s not a problem.

Now we are looking at implementing the repair jobs in Epicor (which need to be acted upon more quickly). We would like the operators to be able to enter the request themselves using Request Entry. However, after that, I think there are too many manual steps to be done before the maintenance personnel are able to clock onto that job and get working on the repair. (At our company, we are fine with assuming that if a maintenance request is entered, someone in our Maintenance department will be working on it. No approval needed.) In standard Epicor, after the operator enters the request, it would still need to be approved so that a job is created, then engineered, and finally released. We could have our Maintenance Planner do all of these busy-work steps but then that doesn’t solve what our 2nd and 3rd shift operations would do when a machine needs a repair during that shift. We have maintenance personnel on these off shifts, but no Maintenance Planner to do these manual steps.
We would like to automate all of those steps for the repair jobs after the operator enters the request in Request Entry.

Is anyone already doing this and if so, can you share how you accomplished this?

One important thing that would be missing from these auto-created repair jobs is some kind of generic “repair” operation. Otherwise, the maintenance personnel will have nothing to clock onto for this job in MES. Has anyone tackled this issue yet?

Thanks, Sharla

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Are you using the template jobs at all? Either in the Equipment screen or for each of the maintenance plans for the equipment? This could greatly reduce the time needed to create the jobs.

For example, if you set the template job at the Equipment level (Main page) this would default as the “MOM” for that equipment when it is based on a request from the floor. In your example, this template would just have the single operation. As soon as it was approved, the job would already have the operation and just need to log into the job and report your findings.

If you truly wish to skip the approval process, you would need some kind of custom for that (likely a BPM but recently saw some IoT functionality that might help)

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Thanks for the reply, John. I didn’t even see that the main tab of the Equipment Maintenance form had a place for template job as well. I will give that a shot! We have only used it on the maintenance plans so far and that part is working great for the operations and materials on the PM jobs.

Yeah, we definitely need to figure out an “auto-approve” process for the maintenance requests from the shop floor. So I take it there’s nothing new on this specific functionality in your current version (10.2.700) then? We are still on 10.2.500 at the moment.

Thanks!

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I’ve been working with Epicor since very late in Version 9 and I haven’t seen ANY changes to how the maintenance module works in that time.

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Ugh, ok. Thanks again for your help!!

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no problem.

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Hi Sharla,

Did you get anywhere will automating the creation of jobs?

Trying to do something about jobs classified as ‘Breakdown’ so that they get approved and then jobs created as soon as request is saved.

Thanks

Alan