MERLIN ERP Data Collection and Integration

The Importance of OEE

Overall equipment effectiveness is used extensively in lean manufacturing and modern manufacturing to better understand your current shop floor operations and how it impacts both equipment utilization, product quality, and production throughput. While most machine monitoring solutions offer the former in what we call simple “red-light-green-light” monitoring, it only paints a portion of the picture of what is actually impacting your manufacturing operations. OEE is a crucial analytical metric whether you are a job shop or a production shop!

Learn More About OEE Here!

ERP Integration Methods

MERLIN supports three methods of ERP integration:
1. Secured, Published APIs
2. Integrated Workflow Engine
3. Physical data file transfer

Addiitonally, MEMEX has also partnered with a number of ERP solutions allowing for direct integrations to Epicor and Syteline through their respective data bridges or terminals. Email sales@memexoee.com for more information if you are using one of these ERP solutions!

All three integration methods utilize MERLIN’s extensive API. Legacy ERP systems can output jobs and product standards in predefined data files, which will be processed and imported into MERLIN.

MERLIN also has an integrated workflow engine to map data tables directly into MERLIN. The workflow Engine employs conditional logic to control the import of jobs and standards.

For more recent ERP systems, MERLIN provides an extensive API to which the ERP can be configured to push jobs and standards directly into MERLIN. MERLIN also supports generating labor/time tickets back to an ERP.

No matter what ERP solution you are currently using on-site, the MERLIN toolkit offers many different proven and currently utilized methods to enable ERP data collection.

Explore our Visual Manufacturing integration here!

To learn more about the MERLIN Operator Portal feature-set, and how it can streamline operator workflow from the shop-floor by utilizing workorders, jobs, and product standards from your existing ERP solution, check out our quick showcase below:

Features & Benefits

Features:

  • ERP connected to shop floor to facilitate ERP data collection
  • Automatically prioritizes and queues transactions by date/time
  • Job assignment to individual machines, cells, and machine groups
  • Support for split jobs
  • Support for Nests
  • Support for rework
  • Support for good part classification
  • Support for reject part classification
  • Automatic data integrity tests on the data received within the ERP-generated output
  • Automatically imports product standards from ERP
  • Support for labor/time tickets
  • API integration support to add MERLIN operational features directly into ERP interfaces
  • Integrates with MERLIN Operator Portal
  • Transfers good and rejected part counts along with Downtime Reason Events
  • Provides Run-Now functionality to load machine Work Orders immediately

Benefits:

  • Access to accurate Real-Time OEE shop floor data
  • Eliminate manual data entry errors and scanning delays
  • Improve auto parts count and inventory accuracy
  • Provide accurate data for job costing
  • Real job shop OEE and production shop OEE analytics

Next Steps