Tl;dr: We are looking for a way to have operation First Articles consume time on inspection resources (CMMs) that can take hours to finish an inspection program and/or a way to link subsequent operations to always run on the same machine (other than setting the method to always use a particular Resource ID). This is so we can have MRP create suggestions that don’t try to break setups and can track first article times while still letting us use some of the flexibility of scheduling with capabilities and resource groups. We are primarily worried about the scheduling aspect of this and can work with our Finance team on the costing portion separately.
Has anyone had success in setting up Kinetic to manage this?
Background and what we've tried
Many of our operations require first article inspections using CMMs which can take multiple hours to start and complete. During this time, the machine that was set up and produced the first article must sit idle and cannot have its setup broken for another job.
In our old ERP and when we first went live in Epicor, we set up the BOOs using a separate Setup/FAI operation and production operation, like so:
- Op 10 - VMILL-SETUP
- Op 20 - VMILL
On the -SETUP operation, the setup time and labor would be the time to set up the machine and run the first part and only had the machine as a scheduling resource. The production time and labor would be the time to run the inspection on the CMM and had both the production machine and the CMM as resources to “block out” the machine so Epicor would not use it.
Resources required for the -SETUP operation: The Okuma is set to Both and the Inspect resource is set to Production only:
This worked okay until we started using capabilities and resource groups to allow Epicor to move operations to different machines - Epicor would want to run the -SETUP operation on one machine and then run the production run on another machine.
We moved to using Epicor’s First Article Quantity and First Article Inspections on a single Operation. In this case the Setup Hours are the hours to set up the machine and run the first article and the production standard is the time to run the production parts. We no longer have a way to track how long it will take to complete the inspection. We did not add the FAI time to the setup time so it wouldn’t skew efficiency reporting, but that might be a way forward.
Our ideal solution would be to have Setup, First Article Inspection, and Production resources and hours all on the same operation, or on multiple operations that are “linked” to always consume the same resource.
Has anyone done something similar or figured out the secret sauce to make this work?