Americas - Pacific Northwest - ID, OR, WA

I am aware that MES will allow multiple people to clock in to a job and that a single worker can clock into multiple jobs.

What I am looking for, is a way to have one person clock in a team of 3-4 people as a group, rather than having each person log in, start activity, log out, then the next log in, start activity, log out, then the next worker and so on and so forth. There doesn't appear to be any solution for actually clocking in a team of people all at once, which is what I am looking for.

Alex Kaminski  |  ERP System Administrator

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

The Ulven Companies

2310 Industrial Ave

Hubbard, OR 97032

Main – (503) 982-9779, x202

Direct – (503) 982-9799

www.ulvencompanies.com

Alex

Have you played with crew size?

Paul Jackson

pjackson@aseptico.com

Hey Paul.

If you are referring to the Crew Size fields in Resource Group Maintenance, those only affect cost calculations when quoting, and the estimated cost of jobs. As far as actual cost, it's based on who clocks into the job; whether it is set to 1 or 100, it doesn't affect how the workers clock in.

-Alex

First... the answer to your question:

No, we do not have anything that will support starting / stopping production with multiple team members all at once (although I can see the benefit of such a solution).

Workaround:

1.       SOME companies create a "team" employee...

a.       ("5-personTeam", "3Personteam", etc)..

b.       each team has its own hourly rate.

c.       Then they choose the correct team to clock in and out of the job

d.       Benefits:

                                                               i.      Easy

e.       Negatives:

                                                               i.      Does not give specific individuals credit for their work.

Workaround 2 is more detailed.. I have never done it, but I can see that it would not be to difficult:

2.       Create a customization to support this:

a.       Need a "Team" table

                                                               i.      Team Name

                                                             ii.      Shop employees on that team

b.       Need a customization in Start/Stop production to ask for the Team

c.       Need a BPM that would automatically clock in the balance of the team if a team is entered.

3.       Challenges with this approach:

a.       What if not all the team members are onsite?

                                                               i.      They would need to start the job manually after they arrive?

b.       What if a team member needs to leave early?

                                                               i.      They would need to stop the job manually in order to clock out.

c.       What if the team continually changes? How to take care of this?

                                                               i.      Maybe add another table for people to be able to change their team?

                                                             ii.      This could get complex

I appreciate the insight, Tim.

We are actually using Workaround #1 and have been for 4 years, but the negatives are actually much worse. I won't bore you with the details, but this workaround causes a lot of confusion in Quoting and Job Costing with Estimated costs and hours.

Workaround #2 sounds similar to what I came up with as a potential solution, but the one I had proposed had none of the challenges you've listed. Basically the lead would start a "Group Activity", enter the normal production information, then would be prompted with a screen to select other employees. After clicking OK, the customization and BPMs would clock those employees on the list into the job, but all of the active transactions would be flagged with a unique identifier I was calling a "Group Sequence". If any worker needs to leave early, they would just clock out of the job with "End Activity" like normal. The lead would use "End Group Activity", which when he finishes his normal clock out, all active transactions that had the same Group Sequence would be clocked out too.

I guess I was hoping this feature would make an appearance in the last several versions, but I've never put the issue up to the EUG for discussion. I have multiple people here though that are telling me other software solutions have this feature and insist that Epicor must already have it as well. So my next step (because we really need to stop using Workaround #1) is to either create the customization myself (I got about halfway through figuring out clocking in multiple users last time), see if Epicor plans to implement the feature in a future update, or pay someone to create it for me.

Alex Kaminski  |  ERP System Administrator

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

The Ulven Companies

2310 Industrial Ave

Hubbard, OR 97032

Main – (503) 982-9779, x202

Direct – (503) 982-9799

www.ulvencompanies.com