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Foy's EPICS Events |
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Extrusion
Production Information and Control Systems |
September, 2004 * Volume 8, Issue 3
In this issue
EPICS 2000.18 Update Includes Five Wishlist items
Other Enhancements in EPICS 2000.18 Update
Welcome to New EPICS Customers
As your customers become more demanding and
your competitors become more aggressive, your ability to reduce delivery time
and meet promise dates becomes more and more critical. And while EPICS contains valuable tools for
loading your departments and scheduling your presses, we have always wanted to
add more scheduling tools for users who want them.
Foy is currently examining a popular third-party scheduling program named Preactor. Preactor is strictly a scheduling application that acts on data in other programs such as EPICS. From our studies so far, it appears that Preactor will do a great job in not only press scheduling, but scheduling for the entire plant.
Preactor comes in several versions, each adding more capability for larger operations. It is very flexible, and can be configured to optimize a schedule based on rules that you can specify.
Foy personnel will be attending Preactor training, as well as a Preactor conference, later this month. We will keep you informed on our progress.
Scheduling
will be the major emphasis of the 2005 EPICS User Conference, to be held April
20-24, 2005, at the beautiful Gaylord Texan Resort and
Convention Center on
As always, the EPICS User Conference will give you a chance to meet with other EPICS users to discuss how to make the most use of the program. Conference sessions will cover all of the enhancements from the last year, showing you how to take advantage of the new features.
Preliminary plans for the conference include a presentation from a company that is providing application hosting of EPICS. Our plans are to have the new Rack Tracking feature and several other significant enhancements ready to present at the conference.
Assuming that our evaluation of Preactor remains positive, we will devote a significant part of the April User Conference to the topic of scheduling with Preactor. So be sure that the people involved in your plant planning and scheduling department are signed up for the conference.
Be sure to mark your calendars now for April 20-22, 2005. See our web site for more information.
As always, the additions included in an EPICS update are driven by user input, as reflected in the Wishlist developed at the User Conference. The 2000.18 update, to be released later this week, includes five items from the Wishlist:
#3 Additional fields have been added to the Customer screen. These fields include additional space for shipping and receiving info for the customer.
#4 When an item is placed on Plant Hold, the date of that Hold is now placed into a new field on the SOItem screen.
#7 The Contacts section of the Customer screen has been expanded, including more telephone entries for each contact.
#9 Stock orders are now automatically closed when they are completed. On orders that have STOCK as the last item in the routing, the Status is set to H and the RemQty is set to zero for all departments.
#16 If you make manual adjustments to the billet inventory OnHand field, the change will be recorded as a positive or negative usage. Also, the billet receiving screen has been improved.
Other Enhancements in EPICS 2000.18 Update
In addition to the top wishlist items mentioned above, a number of other enhancements and additions were made to EPICS and are listed below:
- A new screen for Mass Change of Part Prices was added. This screen is similar to the Adjust Selected Prices screen that currently allows you to quickly make mass price changes on open orders. This new screen lets you make those changes to your part price tables.
- On the Adjust Selected Prices screen, the option of changing prices by a percentage has been added.
- A new pricing unit, price per theoretical lb (or kg), has been added. Using this new unit will allow you to print the theoretical weigh on tickets, manifests, and invoices.
- The Enhanced Shipping screen now allows you to do on-screen manual scanning of bundles that were created after the picklist was created. Also in Enhanced Shipping, a configuration setting (gManualScanWarning) has been added to turn on or off the warning when a user manually checks or unchecks a bundle.
- A bug with reading the checkboxes on the Tensile imput/import screen was fixed.
- On the Advanced Order Entry screen, right-clicking the ShipTo customer now displays a list. And Tool Tips are now available for that screen.
- From the Invoice History screen, you can now create an off-setting entry (a Credit or Invoice) with a single mouse click.
- Picklist and TruckID have been added to the Maintain Ticket screen,
- For production posting, a configuration setting (gMaxShift) has been added to limit the largest shift number allowed. This will eliminate the problem of accidentally entering a large erroneous number for Shift.
- The SOItem screen now shows the date that the item was placed on Plant Hold.
Chris
Delzell joined the Foy team in early August.
Chris comes to us from Safeguard Business Systems, where he was a
programmer/analyst. Chris has solid
experience with the tools we use to develop and maintain EPICS, such as Visual
Basic, SQLServer, and Crystal Reports.
And like all of us at Foy Inc, he is strongly focused on customer
service.
Chris will be attending the Preactor training later this month, learning about this exciting new tool.
Chris and his wife Amanda live in
welcome to New EPICS Customers
Four new extruders have installed EPICS since our conference
in April. Crown Extrusions in
John and Scott will be traveling to
Later this year, Aluminio de Baja
California in
“So I want to put an EPICS
terminal right over there…”
epics customers
On any given day
EPICS is helping over 10,000 people
at more
than 65 extrusion plants around the world.