I’m really new to Epicor ~5 weeks. I’ve been tasked with investigating the Product Configurator and already posted a thread on if it’s worth the time to develop in Epicor 9 given that Epicor 10 is a complete re-write of code. Thanks for all the inputs on that thread. I appreciated it.
I’ve been asking Epicor Sales/Support to provide references of customers who have implemented configurator. I’m tasked with getting a real world estimation of time and/or consultant needs to achieve the configurator and make a recommendation on how to proceed.
Anyone want to share their experiences with getting configurator going including how long it took?
This will vary heavily based on your goals. If you have simple product you’d like to use configurator with them it may be very easy/quick. If you have hundreds of product lines which all need configurators then it can take months/years to develop all of them.
If you let us know a little more about your goals/complexity then we could probably provide better insight into a realistic timeframe and consulting needs.
I would be happy to provide some input, as I am sure all the other gurus
out there, but there are some many levels of configurators and the
complexity can vary widely.
Could you provide perhaps some examples of your product and what you expect
the configurator to accomplish? For example is it just a few options that
depending on the selection drive pricing rules, part number rules, or are
there many options over perhaps many pages that will not only drive pricing
and part numbers but specific material and/or operation selections in a
Method?
In a past life I was with a company with configurators.
They had 15-20 major product lines. For each product line there are over a 1000 powder colors and certain product lines could have with standard or custom fabrics, veneers, etc. They also have three different sales channels which drive product differences. Finally, they had multiple handles, heights, depths, lengths, etc. per product line.The BOM itself is a medium depth BOM with average of 5-6 levels total and some include sales kits also.
At the time of go live they had 4-5 configurators built in about a years time.
It took them about 3 years to get to 50% of product volume coverage. To this day they have the more proprietary and custom OEM items that are still done discretely. They took the most generic highest volumes product lines with the most regular engineering time and started there.
They also have engineering changes happening ongoing and new products, colors, handles, etc.
They are now facing the E10 update mountain. I think it is worth the effort, but it is a long term commitment with ongoing product updates. The ability to add a color and immediately have it available across all configured products is a wing example for them compared to updating hundreds of discrete products BOM’s for a new color.
