You are sooo right about this. On our end… from the start IT was almost not involved… it was a management project. They had ownership. We were only there to support and give our opinions…
(I must admit, Epicor was not my first choice… ;))
But because of that it was management who had control and had to make this work, got all departments involved etc…
The whole process took about 3-4 years from OK lets find a replacement ERP to actual go live. Understanding your processes vs what newer ERP can do is a key. We chose Epicor because of it’s ability to modify it’s behavior in order to fit our needs and processes.
But we were a team of 4. Being alone…I am not sure if success of implementation would have been reached…
Pierre
Personally I think Epicor/Kinetic is in a weird place right now. For new implementations, it doesn’t make sense to go with the classic, stable interface, and the recommended interface (KineticUI) is still not stable enough for general consumption (IMO). Expertise has not yet had time to develop around it, and its addition has caused server code that has worked flawlessly for years to suddenly have new and interesting bugs…
So I can see easily how someone evaluating Kinetic with Kinetic UI in its current (still buggy) iteration, asking questions no one really knows the answers to, and facing a let’s say “less than useful” support department, might be turned off… If you decide to adopt Kinetic right now, you are expected to be a “beta tester”, even though you’re not paying for a beta version… I don’t see an easy way around this, unfortunately…
I think if you had evaluated Kinetic using the old, tried and true interface, your experience might have been different…
The fact you picked 3rd party hosted tells me all I needed to know. You have fd yourself Jokes aside.
It really comes down to the Executives and The Governance Team. I can go on talking about a successful launch vs a fail. But it really comes down to did you invest enough upfront into your own Team and have workflows and processes, and did you have power to make Executive Decisions, if not, you fail.
We had the power to fire the entire plant and replace the people that were anti-Epicor. We never used that power, but once for a Plant Manager who tried to encourage Excel.
I can tell you 20 CRMs we tried and failed… We always blamed the Tool, never the people who use the tool. Salesforce sucks, SugarCRM sucks, Monday dot com sucks… Alright Bob, its time you go suck somewhere else
Once we realized that it’s always the tool that uses the tool, not the tool that the tool uses, we’ve been able to tool along with just about any tool using any tool.
Pardon me while I grin to myself about never switching from the Classic Shell. I never even used the Modern shell (which was really just a fancy menu system)
I admit to feeling backwards and stagnating for still being on Classic, but Kinetic is awful and I won’t subject my users to it if I can help it.
Modern is nice though. You can drop a lot of tiles on the main screen and everything else can be found with the menu search (which actually works). Actually, the Kinetic homescreen is even nicer. It’s all of the actual applications (you know, the things you actually bough the software for) that are hot garbage.
Joshua, we’re getting ready to pull the trigger to move from Epicor 9 on prem to kinetic hosted this week and start implementation next year. Can I bother you with 2 questions?
Pros/Cons of On Prem Vs Cloud for Kinetic? i know the user experience is significantly different, and I was planning push the “modern” views to prevent duplicate development time.
have the past 18 months been rough with Kinetic and them developing/pushing changes etc? is it getting better?
Just trying to warm feet up a little bit before I commit 100% to Kinetic in the cloud!
Thanks in advance.
-Bobby
There are varying opinions on whether on-premise or cloud-hosted computing is the best option. Personally, I believe that the best option depends on your specific needs. I know non-committal right? For our company, we have a PLC integration and therefore it would be more complex for us to switch to the cloud and the effort isn’t worth it to us. However, for others, the cloud may be a more convenient option, or the need for greater scalability and flexibility is there. It’s important to consider that using the cloud may make your internet service a potential single point of failure or bottleneck, but aside from that, on 2022.2 on prem or cloud the clients see it no different it’s all just HTTPS traffic to them.
In terms of Epicor’s Kinetic interface, some users may prefer to stick with the classic interface, especially if they are already familiar with it. However, it’s worth considering introducing some elements of the Kinetic interface to users, as it is likely to be the direction that Epicor is heading in the future. If you are a new Epicor customer, it’s important to consider whether the Kinetic interface is ready for prime-time, but it may not be ideal to go live on the classic interface if a change to the Kinetic interface is imminent. Overall, it’s important to carefully evaluate your options and choose the approach that best meets your needs and priorities.
“On-prem vs Cloud” also gets more complex as there is multiple variations of “Cloud”. The two most common are:
Hosted Cloud - Where Epicor or a third party runs the cloud servers. Backups, upgrades, etc are all handled by the third party and you have no access to the server backend. Plus some other limitations. You’re also at their mercy on upgrade cycle.
Self Hosted - This is basically “On-prem in the cloud” where you run the cloud servers yourself.
I’ve experienced all three and prefer Self Hosted Cloud or On-prem. Unless you’re a small company and don’t have the team to manage the server or just want to outsource those tasks, Hosted Cloud is too restrictive for my tastes.
I find usually the report printing windows are good candidates to expose users to Kinetic gradually. They don’t affect day to day much, they are small in scope, and have a clearly defined workflow to them. I would start by enabling Kinetic there and see where that goes.
I just want to thank everyone who has responded for the warmth & understanding. I worried I was walking into a situation where Epicor loyalists would dunk on me with the vitriol of jilted lovers – but that was clearly unwarranted.
I hope the return to JobScope will be the solution we need, but I’m definitely realistic enough to see that there is no insignificant chance that we are kicking the can down the road 18-36 months.
Having had no particular allegiance to Epicor prior to posting this, I’m currently of the mind that if & when we do go looking for an alternate solution that we should evaluate what Epicor is then without letting the current experience weigh too heavily.
It’s a credit to all of you that I will come away from this posting much more knowledgeable about the issues we faced & aware there are legit experts right in our geographic neck of the woods that we could take a run at headhunting in order to ensure that another crack at this with an up-to-snuff Kinetic has a great chance at succeeding in 2025.
I’ll check back on the thread any time I get a message it is updated, so please don’t mistake this message for a sign-off. Much more of a sincere thank you.
I’ll still be around no plans on leaving this forum. I cut my teeth on Epicor and couldn’t have made my career what it is without the fine people here who have helped me learn.
I realize I’m replying just a little too late, but I’ll put in my 2¢ anyway…
Management commitment is definitely important, but for my implementation the only thing really hanging that up was user buy-in and training. Upper management tried to keep it on track, asking for regular progress updates. It was understood that most customizations including BPMs, reports, and screen customizations would come over time after we went live.
Middle-managers were somewhat weak in making their employees take time for training, though. However, employees were also frequently making excuses, not completing assigned self-training, and generally pushing back against every little thing Epicor did differently from our previous ERP. I personally had to schedule weekly one-hour trainings for each department and attend each them myself as well to make sure questions and answers got “translated” correctly between our users, using terminology from our previous ERP and unique business processes, and our consultants, using more ERP-agnostic and Epicor-specific terminology. I had to frequently talk our users out of requesting customization after customization after customization and insist that their business procedures WILL change and they WILL learn it. “There’s no reason you HAVE to do it the old way, so you WILL learn how to do it this way! This is your job now.” I never went as far as to mention what would happen if they don’t learn it, but I think it was eventually understood.
Our implementation also took about 18 months, though probably closer to 24. I got involved in August 2019, and we went live November 1, 2020, but they had already been working on it for months before I was brought on. Epicor is a decent fit for our business all-in-all, though I think honestly my company is still a bit small to have tried tackling such a complicated implementation (about 40 employees in the US, 20 in the Netherlands who actually just went live this November 1). Much of the pushback from employees was about not having time to do the trainings and their regular job because we had no redundant staff in many departments. As others have pointed out, of course, though, Epicor won’t be a good fit for everyone.
Jokes aside.