We do not currently have Tulip connected with our ERP. I am trying to create an app that does the following:
Sorts the data, lists the data by single load number
Our company manufactures trailers and our logistics department currently manually creates a load sheet as to how the trailers are stacked by size on a flat bed based off of location and build date.
We currently copy the information from Epicor, paste it into Google Docs. Then we have to sort the information by how we want to stack our loads. The information that comes in can have 5-10 lines more or less of different order numbers with the same load number. This is currently a 15+ step process with a lot of copying, cutting and pasting.
Ideally, we realize that until we get connected with our ERP that we will still have to pull the information into Google Docs to manipulate unless we can data dump it into Tulip but where I get stuck is how to organize the orders by size/location within the app. And, we would have to be able to adjust because we have add-on trailers etc. that can happen last minute which would require us to update the load sheet.
I’ve included a snip of what our current load sheet looks like…
Do you have any connection to Epicor beyond their front end? For example, can you use an ODBC? Sometimes people call solutions using these “excel refreshables”.
You are right to say that connecting directly to epicor is ideal, but I also want to see if there is a way to close the gap (at least partly) in the meantime.
Three options come to mind:
-manually input critical reference information (job ID, number of units, size) and let tulip aid and facilitate the load planning process, outputting something useful to the people actually doing the loading.
create a script (python maybe) that uses an ODBC to copy over Epicor data to a SQL database that Tulip can access.
copy paste into some spreadsheet that lives on the cloud (google sheets, excel 365) and let Tulip api to that dataset
Neither of these options are great but they could hold you over until you bridge the connection between Tulip and Epicor. It’s also likely that I don’t fully understand your situation so I could be way off.
Thanks Mark for these ideas. We are incredibly custom which makes what we do hard to automate. We are trying the spreadsheet API to dataset now but not sure if that is the cleanest method. Having a hard time telling to system to pull in all orders that have one order number withought creating 100 steps.
Ultimately, API connection from Epicor would be ideal.
Thanks again for giving some ideas to help us with this!
