Don't do it man!

This is just here as a general response to many questions I often see, where I simply want to say “Don’t do it man!”… but then realize that this would be politically incorrect. (There, I got that off my shoulders…)
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I agree with you 100%, however many of us find ourselves having to say yes we will attempt it because the business demands it, sigh.

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“What is, ‘Should I press the Sync Dataset button?’, Alex”

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I get this in a big way. I walked into an environment here where the past practice was to find an open field in Epicor and decide to use it for something without understanding how Epicor used the field in the first place.

“Let’s tailor part classes so they tell us what supplier they come from or what type of material it is”. We ended up with 50 part classes in a plant that needs maybe five. That one had to be intercepted and corrected as part of an upgrade, fortunately we have others in the building now who are cognizant of the importance of putting data where it belongs - and not putting data where it doesn’t belong.

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Or this.

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We suffered from this early on. If a feature existed in V8, we tried to figure out how to use it, instead of whether or not we should use it.

And on things like the Part Class, there was a constant struggle as to how to best use it. The Materials folks wanted to use it to classify materials (Wire, hardware, etc …) for reporting, while Accounting wanted it to take advantage of the ability to assign different accounts.

Same goes for Product Groups. Sales wanted so many so that they could do reporting on them.
They ended up making Product Groups that were application specific instead of product family based. The same product might appear with a different Prod Grp on different Orders - so that sales could differentiate whether part ABC-123 was used in on a pipeline or a tank farm.

And the one thing to beat into users heads, is that certain functionality can’t be turned off once you started using it. So unless it really solves a business problem, don’t force it into use.

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I worked for a company like that, where the first response to any requirement was customization. To be fair, customization is almost always faster and easier than trying to understand how Epicor wants you to do something. But then later you figure out how it should have been done. When it came time to upgrade from 9 to 10, their strategy was not to set up 10 the right way, but to mindlessly copy everything from 9 and fix it later. That set us back years. And as we know, things like UOMs cannot be fixed later. But that didn’t stop them from trying! Fun fact: if you start “fixing” UOMs with direct SQL updates, Epicor will intermittently freak out trying to do things like convert eaches to eaches. And yet they kept doing it. Quick fixes are a helluva drug…

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We jumped from 8 to 10, and did a clean install rather than an upgrade. This was so that we didn’t pull all the garbage that we had in V8 (which was an upgrade from Vista 4). We’d select specific records to export from V8, and then use DMT to “seed” E10.

At least that was the plan…

Individuals were responsible for cleaning up records - like determining which Vendors, Parts, ShipVia’s Prod Groups, etc… were going to be brought from V8 to E10. But most of them took the easy way out and just said “we need them all”. :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

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@timshuwy That’s so funny because that’s exactly what I say every time Epicor releases a new social product! :joy: :joy:

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Direct SQL Updates… always a “best practice” ROTFLMAO

My current personal rant… I am seeing lots of questions about how to modify the old style screens… rather than how to apply changes to the new Kinetic screens. Every time I see the question, I want to say “Wait… shouldn’t you be applying your changes to the NEW screen? You are going to need to apply everything you just did again once you upgrade.”

“Well, That’s the way we have ALWAYS done it!” says the lemming…
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Epicor phasing out classic interface… myth or truth?!
https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2004/04/27/1081903.htm

Ahhh, lemmings … the ultimate nuclear option:

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Should the answer to any question for a topic on E10, E9, V8, etc… be, “You should upgrade”

:wink:

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Can we get an aggregated list of those questions? I’d like to use it as ammo in the future.

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Sad part is that the don’t do it applies pretty much to every Epicor Partner… off my soap box :slight_smile:

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There are many posts on here already that are on the list haha

“We don’t use Operations here”
“There is no need to complete or close a job”
“When the lead time says 0, it doesn’t matter”
“Adjustments are there to manage inventory levels”
“C:\ is a great location to link documents from”
Oh man, I can go on and on…

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And don’t forget the “we can just fix those issues after we go live”…

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