So I have been documenting UI bugs because frankly, Epicor doesn’t believe there are any. In fact Epicor Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer Vaibhav Vohra confirmed to me in a meeting that kinetic is ‘Prime Time Ready’. This is a bold claim as I routinely cannot perform basic tasks in the system. I am a new user and it is not an option to train my entire company on the outdated classic version just to have them retrain on kinetic. Still haven’t launched yet because of these issues and now this system is putting me in the poor house. Anyone else experiencing this insane amount of whack-a-doo issues with kinetic, or just me? Any tips on how to get Epicor to care?
Are you reporting them to support? My frustration is support always wants infinitesimally detailed steps to reproduce. Then they will tell me they can’t reproduce it and ask for a screen recording. Even if I can reproduce in demo and provide step by step how to do it. They they ask if it works that way in classic. Then finally they will admit they can reproduce it but it takes them weeks to submit a PRB record. Then after that they will come back and tell me to submit an Idea since its designed to work that way, or sometimes they will say it will be fixed in a future release. I have one bug I’ve been trying to get them to fix since February. I just keep entering tickets though, they can’t claim ignorance if we are diligent about reporting the issues.
@Engineer88, and @aosemwengie1 I am with you guys. I submit “feedback” all the time with dumb UI issues. I stopped using kinetic in the client. I only use it in the browser now because support always says the client doesn’t work with this feature or that. I also stopped using the Kinetic forms in general. I use classic forms unless I am forced into the new layout. Thankfully, I don’t do much actual “work” in Epicor. I just make reports, BAQs, and UIs.
I have tried converting some of my classic forms into Kinetic and it just sucks. The interface is terrible, the code syntax is impenetrable, and responsiveness is way down. The kinetic system is slower and more cumbersome. Debugging is supposed to be so much better with the dev tools, but it way more difficult than in classic. There is no way to compile and test your code before you run it. Tracing seems to be dead. The system gives no error, or useless error messages that don’t help at all with bug tracing. I keep reaching for nice things to say about it but always come up with veiled insults.
I like a good Kinetic-bashing post as much as the next guy, but I really don’t think that Epicor (big wigs) care about the issues at the bottom. ‘Prime time ready’ would be a funny joke, if it was a joke…
No software company makes money fixing bugs. That’s not what sells copies of the ERP system.
You go to market and say we have a great ERP system we fixed 20 bugs last month!
Nah, they go to market saying you can tweet from our ERP system and talk to digital assistant EVA. Whatever sells. But seriously, we know they are working hard to try and take care of us. It’s a bummer you both are feeling this way though.
I do love a number of acquisitions and partnerships they are making to try and stay up with technology that will give manufacturers a competitive advantage over others. Automation studio was sick, and they just landed some more consultants with their latest acquisition which should help everyone depending on how they use them- whether they continue to be consultants or they help with other tasks.
Thank you for taking the time to submit bugs. I have also had times where I almost don’t submit it because there is a workaround, but I can’t fall into that, it shouldn’t require us to use a workaround. We need to keep submitting the bugs.
You hit this on the head. Exactly the same for me. My problem though is I am a paying customer and Epicor, a billion dollar corp, is pushing bug reporting down to its paying user base.
I took it one step further and landed 2 meetings with the Dev team so they could see all of these “un-reproduceable” bugs. Which they were ‘surprised’ by these and had never seen any of them. That’s all well and good but that was 2 + months ago and I still live in bug city.
Good for you Logan, glad they are putting you in touch with them. I love it when a CAM does that for us. I had that opportunity to talk to the devs of mobile CRM and ask them questions about why things functioned the way they do and pointed out some issues I was having given the design of it. It was great and made me feel like they were listening. I hope you get the same type of feeling and can get some help on those bugs.
Again, I respect Epicor a ton. It’s just there is probably going to be a disconnect between sales/marketing and what the existing customer base needs because the existing customer base doesn’t have it in them to switch ERP systems nor will they. I do wonder what the rate of people switching from Epicor to another ERP system is- outside of mergers and aquisitions.
One thing to keep in mind as a software engineer I have to tell you if you cannot reproduce the bug you cannot fix it.
I am not trying to excuse Epicor’s lack of action here but again, if I can’t make it happen on my development, environment or repeat it easily or reasonably it is nearly impossible to fix it
So, while I agree that there are lots and lots of bugs, the only ones that can be reasonably fixed are those that can be replicated by Epicor in their development instance that is why Support always asks for very specific steps to replicate. It looks like you have recorded some really odd behavior is here. I would create a ticket for each of these instances, and then try and work with Support to replicate.
Depending on the browser, the architecture, the operating system the day of the week, the page how you got to it, what they use the prior to that, what the cache looks like, etc. it may be very very difficult to make that happen again.
So please keep that in mind and work with Epicor support I promise you they’re not dismissing you.
Let’s keep it constructive I know it’s frustrating
It’s not it would be an empty threat, you would gain nothing by doing so, other than you could go live on classic, never upgrade, and sit there safe and sound.
No it doesn’t fix the issues, but it enables you to hang back in the release cycle. In my experience, .12+ of any given release is much better than .2 or .3 that saas goes live on. Plus there is time to see if any major issues shake out before you start down the upgrade path.
I 1000% get this, in fact I struggle with this with my own users. How often do people contact me with, “it doesn’t work”??? (a lot).
But my frustration is taking the time to fully document the issue including steps to reproduce and screenshots and then half the time they send me a KB article that is completely irrelevant or ignore the details I’ve sent. It should be a two way street, not just us putting in all the effort and them doing the least amount of work for their metrics to show that they met their SLA (without actually doing anything to help).
Another thing to keep in mind is that browser extensions Sometimes have unintended consequences and interact in weird ways. Can you try and replicate the same behavior Inside the Epicor client in the embedded browser or in a pristine browser with no extensions.
Recently, I found that the Adobe acrobat extension specifically can cause some crazy errors in some of the websites because of the way it interacts with the dom