Love this comment, Mark.
1 Like
Now we have to see who the Packers will draft to fix this year’s bad implementation…
May be more about who they cut bait on. I’ve grown tired of lowering my expectations for human behavior in exchange for a 44:6 TD-to-Int ratio, but I do want to see what he could do with those receivers once they’ve got a little more seasoning on them.
3 Likes
Nick, I am sorry to hear that the project was abandoned. It leaves a weird feeling in your gut wondering why or how, and many other emotions.
I appreciate that you stopped by still to post once more about the experience so that others could learn from/with you.
I wish you the best of luck on the system of choice. Hopefully your company is successful unlike the company I am working with that is finally choosing to upgrade to the latest version of Epicor after failing to implement two other ERP systems touting more industry specific functionality.
With that said, I do love @jgiese.wci 's shoehorn analogy and @Randy 's bit on how the system forces you to behave. Because it is so structured it doesn’t always conform to your industry’s process you have to find odd ways to make it work AND you still have to behave in a proper manner. I know even though the company I am working with is upgrading to Kinetic, it doesn’t “fit” perfectly for their industry, but we’ll give that another go because as @jgiese.wci said, “[Epicor] is very capable of that extensibility.” I am sure there is some way to customize where it needs to be customized. The other part I am not so sure of is if we can behave as Randy said…
Best of luck Nick.
3 Likes
I’ve read many times from many sources that the primary reason for implementation failure is a lack of management commitment. It can be frustrating when it’s an IT project and not a whole company transformational improvement project. Not that that happened to you but people need to put in the work to get it done. The dollars are important but the ‘free stuff’ like users practicing and modeling the system are just as essential.
After being on Epicor for over 5 years now, the limits are really your imagination and time. If your BPM has 128 blocks in it and it’s full you can continue with another BPM. You could build your own quoting / development module on a UD table given enough time, skill and desire.
It’s a bummer your implementation didn’t work out. Keep everything, toss nothing because you may be back in 18 months.
3 Likes
I’m going to be completely honest for myself, as well as all our management team here.
If we had to go live on Kinetic UI, we would have abandoned it too. One day it will be
amazing (I hope), but it simply is not ready for prime time, especially if you need to customize
the processes.
I didn’t sign up to beta (alpha? 
) test an ERP system.
The backend though, I am amazed. Very powerful and robust base.
5 Likes
We are implementing another ERP now away from Epicor and oh boy I miss my Epicor tools, incomparable really.
1 Like
Bless!
Take this to heart. Become a hoarder.
3 Likes
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
2 Likes
Oh no, you’re leaving us?!
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…
9 Likes
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
2 Likes
Relatable #2: 1 man Kinetic implementation in an SMB Beauty Product Manufacturing Biz
I am still in shock that Management is employed at this company.
1 Like
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.
2 Likes
1 Like
I can tell you 20 CRMs we tried and failed…
Please do. May save us some time in the future if the expanded Jobscope implementation doesn’t end up being the right solution.
The pressure!!
He’s getting valuable skills that might translate into being a member of a bomb squad, though.
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)
1 Like
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.
2 Likes