Implementation Guidelines

Integrating MES software into your production is a serious matter. 

The duration of the project may take from a month to one year, depending on the scope and size of the implementation.

Aspects like prepared and recorded procedures or qualitative cooperation between supplier, if there is any, and buyer may affect successful implementation.

In the following paragraphs, we present you with the rules of successful implementation.

We strongly recommend getting in touch with us or finding an external consultant especially if you want to integrate your ERP. 

Integration is an easy task but you still need some expertise in it, unless you are familiar with web services, SQL queries and system information.

Check out our official partners here.

The first thing you need to make clear is the different categories of the products along with their procedures and tracking requirements.

Depending on the above information, workflows, BOMs, special fields, quality controls and more will be configured accordingly.

For various product categories, we suggest creating workflow templates with your desired special fields and controls that Epoptia MES provides. Every time you create a new product, you will assign the workflow template that it belongs to.

Also, you should take into account the BOMs or special fields categories, if any. By categorizing BOMs you can use Epoptia's function "Special Field Groups" and assign attributes to the groups (or your categories). Every time you create a new BOM, you will assign the special field group that it belongs to.

The above functions are extremely useful, especially in ERP integrations, because they can be handled by the script of the "Bridge" and thus minimize configuration actions.

The second thing you need to make clear is the production stages and the workstations that exist. If there are too many workstations in the same production stages, the buyer should determine the percentage of the desired inspection and the best way to integrate with many tasks in the same workstation. 

Please see the scenarios section.

The buyer should understand that, as far as the workstations that will be inserted into Epoptia MES are concerned, he/she will have utter control and tracking. That is, knowing who was working and the duration of the tasks. Additionally, he/she will get a complete workstation availability insight, in order to accomplish a far better resource management, planning & scheduling.

It is vital to start from the lowest packages and do not try to consider everything at once. Such a strategy might be very costly for both sides. The project should be divided into steps. The scope of the project should not be the alternation of the procedures, but rather, integrating them and improving efficiency and control of your production.

During the implementation, the company is able to streamline its production processes using the best practices available, which allows the whole company to be managed efficiently and effectively. Τhe buyer must understand the need to provide resources to the supplier in order for the cooperation to transpire efficiently. A project group and a specified leader along with time and authority are necessary from the buyer's side. Set up an implementation schedule and execute it in cooperation with the supplier, thus providing full support and control.

We strongly recommend a test run, which will affect final decisions and fine-tunings on implementation. During tests, it is recommended to provide the software with the actual daily workload giving time for the buyer's managers to train and familiarize with it. As far as the operators are concerned, we strongly recommend training them all together and always have a buyer's representative with you. In the end, it is the buyer that will "force" the operators to use Epoptia MES. From our experience, we would never have some operators work with Epoptia MES and some without it! This trial run was a total failure because they immediately switched back to their known old ways!