Just a little bit of a rant here… We (I) spent a year getting ready to implement Epicor…a system that management agreed on… to replace the old system that lacked SO much… So WHY do I constantly hear “In ‘blank’, I could see all this information on one screen” " There are too many mouse clicks to get to what I need" “I can’t do things the way I used to”. NO #$%^ !!! The old system didn’t have a quarter of the functionality and information and ABILITY that Epicor does! It’s a new system - things take time!
Anyone else dealing with this type of stuff? Sometimes I feel like I’m spending my life trying to come up with a BAQ to duplicate the “old system” . Just ARGHHHHHHH!
Epicor has a lot of functionality, but it’s extremely complicated to set up. There’s no modern concept of convention over configuration. A million and one things have to be just right before you can see a process work at all. Miss one checkbox somewhere and you’ll be ripping your hair out. The initial setup (which can easily take years) is a daily roller coaster of feeling great about finally getting something to work, then immediately hitting another wall.
People in purchasing before launch: “I can’t wait till we get on Epicor. Then Engineering will be forced to do the right thing finally! And will tell on them if it is their fault.”
People in purchasing after launch: “I hate Epicor. It forces ME to do the right thing all the time, which slows me down. Plus it tells on me if I mess up and cause problems for others.”
In my old car , a 1969 Chevy Nova, I had an AM radio with an 8 track tape player. In my 2021 Blazer it has XM radio with rewind capability and Blue tooth for my Phone and a cool touch screen, but I would rather have an 8 track tape player.
To many people change and unfamiliarity makes them uncomfortable
And by the way - Epicor is too “Mousey” in my opinion
Yeh my people didn’t find it very useful either for the first several years… until they finally decided that maintaining dates on jobs, orders, and POs would actually be useful.
I was an avionics tech in the Marine Corps in the late '90s. We had an issue tracking system called NALCOMIS (a.k.a. NALCOMATOSE) that was complete garbage. Everyone was happy when the system went down and we had to break out the old pen-and-paper VIDS/MAF board.
I have a client now that can’t stop entering everything in ALL CAPS like they did in their legacy system.
I’m also a lot more “keyboard-enabled” and somewhat “mouse-challenged”… and getting the “mouse-enabled” crowd to learn how to use the TAB key is exhausting.
The ‘tab’ instead of enter has been hard for a lot of people here to get the hang of – I’ve gotten used to it myself. There are sometimes a lot of mouse clicks to get somewhere – but that doesn’t really bother me because it’s so much easier than having to retype things in multiple modules to get the information …not everyone agrees with me however…so I’m spending a LOT of time trying to come up with BAQ’s to make life easier for those that want Epicor to work the same way as Quickbooks…
Failure of organizational change management. They have unintentional resistance when on the surface they know it’s good for them. Sounds like executive misalignment as well. They haven’t painted a clear picture of what the future was going to be early enough in the process.
If you aren’t live and you aren’t going to the Kinetic UI before going live, I would seriously consider a pivot by the way. It might feel like you’re too far down the road for that, but when they drop support for classic in the next few years you’ll be doing this all over again. Rip the band-aid off all at one time.
By and large, most of my everyday users and shop floor are doing great. My biggest challenge IS the executive area – even though said exec approved the implementation and promised to be all on board…
We went live in December, so we’re pretty far in … are you suggesting that we get to the Kinetic UI sooner than later? I’m trying to get us to 10.2.700…I need a cone of silence or a really big wall built around me for about a week though. I haven’t even downloaded the Kinetic UI to even start to think about though.
