At the risk of offending someone, I am curious what you have found to be the best resources for bringing new people online and showing them the ropes in Epicor. I am aware of training videos Epicor has and they are somewhat usable. But I feel like they leave off at the very basic concepts and you still have to do a fair amount of research to understand more complex things and how the decisions you make at one module/screen have impact on what happens elsewhere. Not to mention many times you don’t even know a feature exists to even research it.
Before I go trying to re-invent the wheel, does anyone have any recommendations for a place to start to get good onboarding/training content? Or am I best left to a consultant who might already have such material created?
Epicor’s training videos are useful for someone who has never seen Epicor before and needs to know just the basics of how the system functions.
The Hands-On Learning courses are somewhat more in-depth and bring the user into more functionality by bringing them through additional options and features.
That said, they can only show you what the out-of-the-box processes are. Whenever we do an implementation, we take those skeletal processes and have our customers create their own End-User Procedure documents for every process they use in Epicor, with the hope that over time they will update these documents as changes take place or new processes get developed. This means that there could well be dozens of EUP docs, but without them it comes back to just tribal knowledge, and if someone leaves the company and they’re the only one that knows how to do this thing, the knowledge leaves with them.
Epicor used to have a Knowledge Mentor product that allowed you to create your own custom training/EUP videos, and there are several other products available now, but nothing straight from Epicor is going to do anything more than scratch the surface of what it all does.
I am arriving at your conclusion as well. We had all the users create their documents for all their procedures before go-live. They have not been well-cared-for over the last 4+ years now and probably require a fair amount of updating. I think where I am veering off that course a bit is that Epicor is so capable of handling such a variety of situations… Often, there’s a “standard” way and then there are the multitude of circumstances that can happen when we need to do it a different way. I’m often the first person people call when they need to deviate. How do I get my knowledge of all the nuances and intricacies and special cases into other users’ heads? It’s great that I have job security… but we would be much more operationally efficient if there was a go-to user for each “module” that knew all of these tricks and settings and stuff. Maybe I’m just looking to rant… but it seems like there should be a better way. I’ve thought about screen recording myself doing things and then making an archive and tagging the clips into some sort of knowledge base that could be searched/referenced.
We are in the process of doing this before we go live with Kinetic soon … but
This is the cost
I was dumped into Epicor for the first time last September … with just Epicor help documents (specifically Customizations and the BPM Cookbook) … and the rest has been research on my own (mostly here)
Critical… and also a HUGE, never ending document management project. But worth it if you can get a subject matter expert from each discipline to commit.
The continuous updates and rollouts are very difficult to keep up with.
Another idea, if it helps you… when we first went through implementation training, our Engineering Director actually recorded training sessions (I think he just did his training on TEAMS and recorded it). So, whenever he gets a new hire… he can have them watch the training videos.
Again… screens have already changed dramatically since then… but it was a good source of training material for new Engineers trying to learn how to check parts in/out of Engineering Workbench, create BOM’s etc.
Brilliant! We always record (on Teams) the Conference Room Pilot (final end-to-end test before go-live), but I’ve never thought about using that as a training tool. With a decent video editing tool that could be folded/spindled/mutilated into lots of smaller chunks for each area.
I do this for our company. I take the Microsoft Teams recordings of trainings and clean them up with Microsoft Clipchamp. It’s quick and easy even though I have 0 video editing experience.
We’re building a Teams channel with a library of training videos and documents specific to our company.
I am currently updating all of our procedures to Kinetic and once I feel confident enough, I am creating a video to go with it. This allows the users to select which method they learn better with. I have also created a master list with quick links for each procedure/video to make it easier to find.
I just used the screen recorder add on that is available in Edge to record the videos.
I think one of the biggest frustrations to trying to learn Kinetic is that they have changes the names on a crap load of stuff, making it even harder to find to even update our procedures.
I also found that the training videos in learning center is nearly useless as it only covers the exact bare minimum but doesn’t even cover small things that are necessary for the global to run properly like ensuring all of the assemblies are made “make direct”.
You also need Executive buy in to make it happen. In a perfect world, the document update should be part of your internally Epicor team’s duties as well as testing patches before go live and discussing customizations to make sure they don’t cause issues across other departments.
I do use ELC as a beginning tool, and then build on it for our procedures as I noted above, the videos are missing some very basic stuff that should be included for things that we have learnt over the years through trial and error (mostly error, lol).
It takes time, but well worth training purposes to create/update your own procedures.
Also, if you have any customizations, obviously, that will not be included either.
One of the things I just learned about was the ability to share a link directly to a specific page in Epicor. Might be helpful in your documentation / videos if you can get the link to be actually clickable.
