In one step of our process, multiple employees log into MES using the same employee ID. This is done because the job can be logged in first thing in the morning, but wont be finished until 3rd shift 3 days later. New jobs are added in every day and as a result, there are about 15 jobs logged in at one time. Because of this that departments MES operates at an unworkable speed. Just yesterday it took an operator 15 minutes to log into two jobs.
Is there a better way to handle this situation? Or does this sound like an issue with Epicor, our server, or something else on our side?
I guess I’m not understanding why you would have multiple employees using the same ID. If you are doing this because it takes multiple days to create one part, you don’t have to do this. Each employee would have their own ID. The 1st shift person would clock into the job first thing in the morning. At the end of their shift, they would End Activity with zero (0) quantity. This would capture their time but not report the operation as finished.
The 2nd shift employee would clock into the job just before or just after the 1st shift person clocks out, depending on whether you want to capture overlap in time. They would run the rest of their shift, then clock out with a zero qty and the 3rd shift worker would clock in to replace them.
When the operation was complete, the person running the operation would End Activity and report a qty of 1.
What does using one employee ID do to your job costing?
Beth, Thank you for your input. For the record, this is a shell drying operation that takes 3-4 days per lot of parts. We have about 3-4 operators in there (3 shifts/24hours) and no one person is responsible for a specific lot. If one user was to clock in all twenty jobs, he would then have to clock out all twenty at the end of the shift, which would take forever to do since the sluggish MES problem would still exist. The sluggish problem would continue as the next shift operator starts production on the jobs that were just clocked out.
You should use the work queue for that. The operators can clock out of all of the jobs that they are clocked into in one batch. Same for clocking in, they just have the select the jobs in a grid view.
Could the operators enter in the Labor Qty through the work queue’s “mass end activity”? i noticed the labor qty column allows you to enter in an amount but will that stick after i click End Activity with multiple jobs selected?
Yes they can. The way that screen works is, if you clock in and clock out of the operation in the same session (don’t close the work queue screen) the labor quantities will automatically be filled in (initialized) with the required quantities. If you close the work queue screen after you start activity, and re-open it to end activity (like your situation would be if they clock in at the beginning of the day and clock out at the end of the day) the labor qty fields will show 0, but you can change the labor quantity at that time to whatever quantity you finished.
