There’s a lot of welding and related activity going on in our shop, so fanless is a requirement to keep out the metal dust. Machines are small enough to velcro to the back of a monitor. Workstations can be any convenient surface where a monitor stand and the peripherals can live. Peripherals are cheap enough to not care when the environment chews them up.
I’m holding out hope that Edge Agent will remain a non-breaking dependency so we can commit to tablets. There aren’t exactly a lot of Windows tablets to choose from and all are waaaay outside what makes sense to spend on something that the shop floor is going to grind up and spit out.
One of the dirty little secrets is that Epicor/Kinetic really requires a physical keyboard. There’s too many fields that need input, and "soft’ keyboards get annoying quickly.
MES Browser or Client in UX is not a good choice for automation I have found.
We are using Classic MES and Combo Barcodes that add Tabs between fields when a single barcode is scanned. It populates the JOB#, ASSY#, OPERATIONID and moves to the OK button. We could not do this in new UX as Wedge Tabs do not cross Cards in the UX Screen.
Any advice on moving to the new UX and reducing data entry by operators would be very much appreciated.
We want a single scan for them to begin an operation from the printed barcode on Job Traveler and can achieve this with Classic MES only. I suppose some coding could be done…but open to ideas.
As a side note, I was looking at getting 75 Zebra Scanners for MES, and got a tip at Insights a year ago. Epicor bought pallets of Honeywell Voyager 1470 Scanners during Covid in preparation of the shortage of devices.
They still had them as early as March and were offering them at “Fire Sale” pricing. They are excellent 2D Scanners that take photos too! We bought 75 of them and they are working excellent.
Only drawback was they do not have the stands, so we purchased those separately for $26.
Contact Jenine Anderson at Epicor to see if you can get them. Abou 1/2 the price of Zebra LS2208 which is a 1D Scanner only!
Honeywell in foreground, LS2208 behind it.
Thank you everyone for your tips and recommendations. For the MES computers you have, do you just have the respective production supervisor log in/out of the computer itself at the start/end of each shift? Thinking about automating that somehow in case they are ever out of the office.
We also work in a metal fab environment, so we consider most of this hardware disposable and buy it on the cheap.
We do the same as @klincecum. Cheap Dell workstations, KB & Mouse, double monitors, and cheap barcode scanners (and I mean Amazon cheap).
We’ve got 20 of them, 5-6 users per, and they log in as a generic Epicor user automatically via policy/script. If they ever get hung up, the employees know to just bounce them and it’ll come back to the MES screen.
The second monitor right now is running a digital signage client on some stations as a test to see if it’s worthwhile, but some are used to view ECM docs connected to the jobs.
We’ve not tried the web MES yet, but what @visionaire said makes me pause.
I would love to use everything in the new UX, but many still don’t quite work fully or as in the case of MES, is a slow-down for users having to scan, Job#, Assy#, OpID to start work. Seems like no big deal, until you use a combo code that does it all in one scan, then you see that it is kind of a delay when 700 employees are hitting 70 MES stations all day long. I imagine sometime soon getting the Kinetic MES working, however, due to being web based will take a bit of special programing that is not as easy as Classic.
Sounds like you have a good handle on the stations hardware.
One thing I noted was using the same main user account to login to open MES initially. Epicor recommends using distinct user accounts, and since security is tied closer now in MES to the User Permissions, it makes sense to have seperate user accounts. We are just rolling out for Go-Live and already see the issues with one account to rule them all, lol
I’m copy/pasting this from a different thread so I don’t have to re-type it all… but it is possible in browser kinetic. This is all we’ve used since going live in Feb. 2023… couple issues during Epicor updates, but we usually have them patched prior to the updates hitting Live (just like any other customizations).
We have done a lot of barcoding in our MES.
MES Main Form:
We added a text box called ScanValue… the trick is to place it so it is in-focus.
We have barcodes set up for values like:
STARTPROD
STARTSU
STARTREWORK
Etc.
… all of these are printed out and posted next to our kiosks.
The user has to log in. But then can scan a STARTPROD barcode. The scanner has an auto-tab…
This kicks off an onblur event which is pretty complex “switch” event. (one switch for each possible menu selection (startprod, start set-up, start rework, end this, end that, etc.). So, if the scanned value is STARTPROD, it has a condition to verify a user is logged-in and then opens the Start Production slide out.
On our routings/travelers… we created (1) barcode which includes the Job, assembly, and operation separated by a chosen variable “$A” for example. This gives the user only (1) barcode to scan. That value lands in a textbox bound to TransView.ScanValue (or something to that effect).
We have a function which splits this scan and parses the data (based on the above chosen variable) into the target fields. So, with one scan from the routing, the job/assembly/operation is all filled in.
They can then scan their Resource ID from a printed list of barcodes (if it isn’t the default on the operation).
Click “Ok” and they’re on the job.
Likewise, if they initially scanned a STARTREWORK barcode, it would open that form, they scan the job/assembly/op barcode on the routing… verify Resource ID… click “ok” and they’re on the job.
At the end of each leg of the “switch” event, we set the onfocus back to the ScanValue field so it can receive the next barcode instruction.
FULL THREAD in case there are more details in there that help:
Thank you everyone for your input. I assume both the browser or smart client work equally well on just wifi (assuming it’s reliable)? Also, if anyone wants to share a picture of their MES setup, that would be great to see as well.
