I stumbled across the Action Plans section under System Management today and remembered this post from @timshuwy last summer teasing it briefly.
Has anyone implemented anything using this Action Plan feature yet? I’d just like to see what uses people have come up with for it so far. We are using the task set feature with our quotes to move a new quote through our process but from the post last summer Action Plans should be much more generally applicable throughout Kinetic.
I didn’t see any info on Action Plans in the Epicor Help or Epicor Learning Center. I played around with it a little and it looks like you can create Actions similar to how you would create Tasks, but to create an Action Plan I had to tie it to a SysRowID before I could add a list of actions; as opposed to a Task Set that you can create as a standalone record and then assign the task set to a quote or case later.
Makes me more curious as to how people are using them because you’d basically have to create Action Plans via BPM to avoid a lot of tedium creating a new action plan every time you wanted to use it.
Just gonna keep documenting my progress here. It looks like there are 5 tables related to Action Plans but the current menu items only interact with 3 of them.
ActionPlanMasterHdr and ActionPlanMasterDtl don’t get anything written to them when an action plan is created and the ActionPlanHdr table has a field called ActionPlanInstance that makes me think if there were records on ActionPlanMasterHdr, it would increment the count in that field.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll try creating a record in ActionPlanMasterHdr through Rest and see if it becomes a selectable plan on the Action Plan screen.
Did you have to request a new license/purchase that? Our license does not have it enabled it seems.
Haven’t made any license changes. We’re on 2024.2.7, so maybe it’s just the latest version?
We are on 2024.2.7 and the ActionPlans license is not active, so it seems it is a separate license.
I hadn’t really thought to check the licensed modules since it was showing up, but it is not Licensed or Enabled in my environments. Maybe the unfinished versions showing up in my menu is just a bug for now.
Thanks for the info @timshuwy, hopefully there will some good demos and examples of how it can be used if it would require another license. Convincing upper management to spend more money without being able to test and show what the new functionality is can be a hard sell.
@timshuwy would you say this is akin to earlier releases where you could attach an application link with the record information in it to open up the exact record that needed attention, using a Business Activity Manager (BAM)
In a past life, we had a BAM process that would send an email that had the application link in it that allowed the person receiving it to approve a quote, based on particular value rules setup as user codes.
well… yes and no… yes, you will be able to have “deep links” into applications that are associate with an action. But BAMs were totally hard coded. With these, there is a data structure that holds the ACTIONS and a LIST of actions that needs to be performed, and each one has a deep link either back to the object in question, or to the screen that needs to be accessed in order to perform the action (run a report, or approve/reject).
I use the term BAMs a bit loosely, in that quote solution I mentoned we used a .p (yes it is that old) to do the work, but at the end of the day it used the xml template that was the email link that the recipient just clicked on and it opened up epicor at the right form and record.
I like the solution it will help a lot with workflow outside of Case Management.
Can’t hurt to ask your CAM for a 14 day demo license when it comes out, so you can kick the tires…
