Vaibhav Vohra was super kind and great to talk to when I met him at Insights. You know he’s got a lot going on underneath him so he can’t be everywhere at once I’m sure. Still, keep pressing on. Hope you were able to vent for a minute, but yeah like everyone is saying let us keep it constructive.
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Due to security compliance issues with the gov this is likely never going to be the case. There will always be situations where the customer has to be incontrol of the hardware and network, or needs to run on very specific hardware with special hardware level security features. It’s just not practical for them to go all SaaS.
Email Chris with your customer experience concerns chris.warticki@epicor.com he is part of the escalation tree.
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I’ve got to say support is way better than when I first started my journey with Epicor, but I feel like the Kinetic is not yet a finished good.
The base of Kinetic may be “prime time ready”, but the implementation/support needs to catch up. It’s a difficult time to implement because companies do not want to train in classic and then retrain in Kinetic, but yet cannot train in Kinetic because it isn’t really ready.
End users don’t understand development cycles and don’t understand why their system isn’t working. We have to try to explain why the system is a good system despite the growing pains (in other words, we are QA). It will be some time before we reach equilibrium with Kinetic like we have with Classic.
Until that time, we as users have to be thorough and over report details in our issues to ensure they get addressed. If they are not getting addressed, we have to be diligent to escalate our issues to make sure they do get addressed.
The only problem I have is the lack of pushing updates to current releases. I reported a bug in 2022.1 and the fix won’t be pushed out until 2023.1. I don’t feel like that is a good enough response for our support $$$ that we are spending.
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We will look back on this thread in two years and say wow, look how far we/Epicor have come.
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Thank you for this @josecgomez ! I did not know this and this will help me in the bugs I find. I just assumed client = web.
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I first started using Epicor in 2014 on 10.0. Man, I hated Epicor because there were so many bugs and things just did not work right. I remember there was some feature that the company was waiting to get released and the minute it did, we upgraded. It was 10.1.something. So much improved on that upgrade.
Since then, each version I have worked with was better than the last and I grew to love Epicor.
I do feel like we are back to what it was like when 10 came out. And the thing I keep coming back to is that Epicor did the best they could, and they DID fix the bugs. Is it inconvenient, yes. Am I mad at Epicor now, no. They have a proven track record, and they WILL address everything they can.
Everybody wants to move forward, but no one wants bumps. If companies waited to release things that are “perfect”, when they went to release it, it would already be out of date.
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Doug, that’s a good point! We used to be able to report bugs, and get one-off fixes (which weren’t always fully tested). Then Epicor stopped doing that to improve stability, and fixes got rolled into full .releases that had more thorough testing… Now it seems that rarely anything gets back-ported from the next future release (currently 11.2.300, aka Kinetic 2023 Spring). I’ve had a few things that finally got accepted as bugs in Kinetic 2022.1, that will be fixed in 2023.1. Hopefully they get back-ported, but I’m not holding my breath. Unfortunately, we take too long to do our validation testing and can only afford to upgrade annually.
On thinking it through, that can’t be completely true, since the other (not latest) versions get bi-weekly bug fixes too! Maybe we’ll just get them a little later in the cycle, regardless if the PRB says it’s fixed in a later release…
We’re thinking seriously of creating short-cuts for the browsers that auto-starts Kinetic (when we go all browser, not yet) and disable extensions. That way, the browser running email won’t have access to Kinetic data. Mostly thinking about token theft, browser flaws, etc.
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Here’s my take on Epicor support.
- They run support like they are supporting a 30$ shareware.
- The support staff doesn’t know head from tail, and all they basically do is search the database to see if the submitted case was ever submitted by anybody else. If not, your ticket is closed as non-reproducible. This is a major issue especially within the context of Kinetic. ALL issues are new issues.
- Support/QA doesn’t seem to have access to testing environments in all published versions. Do everyone a favor and buy more servers and create one testing environment for EVERY version you publish in the wild, and keep one year worth of versions available for your QA/support staff to be able to actually reproduce the issues we submit, in the version we are having the issue. This way they can tell us the issue was actually fixed, or not, and in which version.
- When we submit an issue and supply the solutions to test, and a nice document with all the steps to reproduce, how about ACTUALLY TRYING TO REPRODUCE IT?? I spent a couple of hours documenting all this crap for you, respect my time!
- As a consultant, we basically get the same support as any other customer. Consultants need to be treated by a level 2 support, please. By the time we as consultants have to submit a ticket, you have to assume we’re way beyond what your run of the mill support can suggest we try. We already tried it all. Connect consultants with support leads or dev directly, and remove some of the red tape for your “partners”. We’re basically your first line of support, and we don’t even charge you!
I don’t mind reproducing the issue and documenting it if I know it’s going to be looked at. But right now I have come to the conclusion Epicor support is a waste of time for me. If I can’t solve it myself, the odds that Support will provide any solution worth the name are slim to none. It’s just faster and more efficient to pivot to an alternative solution and forget support altogether…
I had a longer post with an example convo with support, but left a name in there by accident, and apparently copying support tickets is frowned upon, so let’s just leave it at “completely unsatisfactory”…
/rant
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My two cents…
I was an early adopter of Vantage 8 which was a major technology change for Epicor from the Vantage 6 and earlier versions. The release of Kinetic reminds me a lot of those days. It was simply bug riddled and not nearly ready for prime time. But, it was definitely the right direction. It just sucked to be part of the early adopting companies. Frankly, I think software companies would be forever in releasing new technology without pushing out buggy versions for companies to work on.
I’ve got a number of clients who are moving to the cloud, and therefore on the cadence schedule with Kinetic. I’ve been pretty consistent: let’s use out of the box forms wherever possible and run them in the Kinetic version. For those forms that need customizations, we’re doing them in the classic style and know we’ll have to redo them in application studio at some point down the road. Application Studio will be ready at some point. And, I’m thankful for people like the Jose’s and Hannah’s of the world that are doing much of the work that will make Application Studio ready. But for a small company with a single IT person - investing the time to learn AS simply isn’t worth it yet.
I’m thankful Epicor finally realized that AS is not fully ready for the “mandatory 2024” rollout and has extended that time. I’m personally excited for a lot of changes that Kinetic is bringing and can’t wait until it is “ready for Prime Time”.
Kevin Simon
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Logan, we always appreciate candid feedback from our customers, as we are always pushing for excellence in our products. We have been analyzing your findings (videos, tickets, etc.) and a member of my team will be reaching out to you directly to discuss further.
Thanks
Vaibhav
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I appreciate the time you took out of your day to make a pubic statement. Thank you
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I can only add in my experience Kinetic isn’t prime time ready, maybe in 24 months. It is similar to Epicor 10.0.x which required alot of one-off’s then 10.1.400 was okay… 10.1.600 was stable… 10.2… got better…
It’s just the cycle I guess. I find UI bugs plenty, which seem so simple that they shouldn’t exist to begin with. In other words… a Junior could fix them. At the end of the day, they will be fixed, just matter of prioritization I guess and maybe Epicor can recruit more Controlled Release folks!
Wow thanks for documenting alot of them, nice list!
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Hi Evan, happy to!
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In exactly the same boat as you. We are due to go live with Kinetic (SaaS) in February 2023 but have been hindered by bugs. The latest ones make the Product Configurator unworkable for us and will move our go live date by two months, whilst we await patches.
Eight months in and even our consultants have been caught out by Kinetic issues in almost every single session. I try to report everything, but it’s difficult to make the time. However, this thread highlights how important it is to keep doing so.
Still, I would love to understand more about Epicor’s QA process. There have been some obvious UI glitches for several releases - with grids for instance. Trying to scroll down or filter within one causes weird behaviour, like disappearing data or lagging. Support reproduced this one easily and found it affected other customers, so raised a Problem ticket. However, considering users are met with a ‘Landing Page’ grid on almost every screen opened, how does this get past QA?
It’s eroding confidence in a system which otherwise has huge buy-in within our company. Features like App Studio and DMT are a gamechanger, coming from our legacy system.
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Here is another minor one…
When on the browser prompts for Server URL, you must get the syntax correct:
// Errors will happen because of the / at the end
https://yourserver/ErpInstance/
// This will work
https://yourserver/ErpInstance
It shouldn’t matter the / should be truncated, it shouldnt even matter if you use \ vs / it is a common issue, when a website asks you for url do you worry about / at the end or not?
I never think about it, when it asks you for a UNC Path do you stop and think oh boy should I do \\MyServer\Folder or \\MyServer\Folder\? No you don’t, both should work just fine heck even \\MyServer\Folder\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ should work fine, if you use the right .NET Helpers.
Internally when we build apps, this would fail internal testing, would have been caught. We’re not even a Software Company, we build Trusses for Houses.
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@Vaibhav_Vohra responses from support like below are frustrating. Not their fault, but Epicor can’t claim this whole Kinetic Journey is about enhancing the user experience but then create KB articles with BS directions as the solution. I very clearly remember all the claims about hiring UX experts to make this thing a Cadillac of user experience and it’s anything but.
Knowing full well I’m going to get pushed to the ideas portal I still provide feedback. (sidebar why did you guys remove the feedback button? This is something I would ask my users to submit themselves through that means)
And the response is Ideas portal. I’m not wasting votes on something small like this, but these small issues and usability issues create an unfriendly experience that we admins then get to mop up after. It’s very very frustrating.
Below is the issue for reference should I back bill epicor for the 40 minutes we spent trying understand what was wrong?
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Don’t be stealing my invoicing Epicor Idea. We just sent our first invoice to our CAM see if he pays it 
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Damn, I only asked for a free shirt and hat, I’ll try this next 
.