I think we made a mistake going with Epicor

Thanks. I’ll try to keep positive and roll with it for now.

This forum is pretty great.

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So Epicor does have a product called Info Worker which let’s you sync contacts and such from Epicor into / out of Outlook and record those emails as “calls” in the Epicor CRM. But I will agree that the Epicor CRM functionality is severely lacking.

I’m not sure I follow your Project / Order issues we might be able to help with some of that, all Orders can be tied to a Project at the Order Line level I’m not sure what you are looking to “push” from the Order to the Project that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

MOM Data is tied to the Part / Part Rev , or Quote and Job so I’m not sure how again that would be pushed into the project. If you quoted and built a Mom on the Quote that will carry through / push to the job attached to the demand order and you can pull details from either a Part Rev, a Job or a Quote so you don’t have to type anything twice.

I think you need some help understanding the software and how it works a bit better. You should do the foundation education classes that Epicor offers and the Education courses for the basics of Quote to Cash. That is all available in the Education Portal.
Take the Epicor Knowledge Camp course.

No software is perfect and Epicor may be too big for you guys you keep saying you are too small. How small is your company? How many users of Epicor?

This is their “New User” flow take the time to do some of these and you’ll be in much better shape.

Here is a Walk through of Information worker logging email communication directly into Epicor for you
https://players.brightcove.net/2615230543001/ByL51vWA_default/index.html?videoId=6156058948001

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I know how you feel. I have worked with a few companies who didn’t like Epicor either. They put on this dog-and-pony show with a small dataset.

I don’t have Epicor’s Project but I have seen it in action and it leaves much to be desired. I think folks are expecting something like MS Project. Not even close.

@anon99908839
After reading @josecgomez’s great post I thought I might add a different perspective. As a small company, you may also want to consider a few other modules:

  • Collaborate - it will track internal conversations at a company and/or transaction level - and you can do some cool things with it and Teams - with more new features to come hopefully.
  • ECM/Docstar or Cloud Account Attachment Storage - you can attach almost anything to a transaction. Have your conversation in Outlook with the customer, and when it’s complete, drop that email thread onto the quote as an attachment. No need to have a permanent connection to outlook in this case - and the storage capabilities can be used all over the system.
  • APR - Print routing and sending documents to the customers. Using the email addresses on the customer/contact/ship-to records you can have the system automatically deliver quotes and order acks and other stuff simply by ‘printing’ them. It’s more flexible than that but it’s nice to use.

I mention these in particular, because we’re ‘building’ a CRM solution out of these pieces so it works the way we want, not just the way some other software works.

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And you are definitely not the first person to be frustrated with learning Epicor!

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With respect to this complaint specifically, did you check out Epicor’s Extended Solutions that I suggested in your previous topic (Logging email communications)?

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With respect to Mike’s suggestion regarding APR, please consider voting for Kinetic Idea #363, Modernize Report Data Definitions to include contact email addresses for all externally distributed forms.

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This is the basis of most of the pain that all ERP users feel regardless of the product. My wife often says,

An expectation is an unborn resentment.

When we expect the new system to act like like old ERP system, the manual system, a system we have in our head, then we’re just setting ourselves up for disappointment.

For me, it’s like learning a language (spoken or computer, doesn’t matter). Just forget the language you know and accept the way the new language does it. In that way, one discovers the (different) beauties the other language has to express ideas.

And as a bonus, I find the idea works with people too! :slight_smile:

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I like this

Hopefully things will smooth out for you.
But (I think) you are not alone, most end users love to hate their ERP software.

While I like the concept of Kinetic, it’s still relatively new. So… I plan on using the classic interface for at least another year or two.

Switching brands almost always involves pain and disappointment. This is why I tend to stick with the “devil I know”.

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I have been consulting on Epicor software for 14 years now starting out with Vantage 8.03.
A common thread that I have seen when users have been frustrated with the ERP system is not setting up the system correctly and following the “flow” of the design of the system.
There have been several times when I came into a customer that was frustrated, and after checking a few boxes or adding some parameters, the system began to do what they needed.

Other times, added customizations or workarounds sometimes cost you more than following the standard flow.

Project is a complex beast and working through some of the summarization tables can help you understand how the build analysis can work for you to calculate your gross margins, etc.

This forum is here to help you as shown by the response to your frustration.

@anon99908839 Welcome to the club!

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Hi @josecgomez
is this from Epicor University ?

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I’m not sure which “this” you are referring to, but yes the courses are from the Epicor Education Portal, the Info Worker walk through is from…some presentation Epicor gave at one point not sure where.

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many Thanks @josecgomez, yes mate, i was referring to this platform and shown courses

Epicor is useless if not dangerous without customizations.

We had to constantly implement new BPM’s to create warning messages that I think should have been standard out of the box. And we are still doing so 2 years later.

We made tons of BAQ’s and Dashboards to get at the data we wanted in a timely and human readable way.

That being said, it would be even worse if we couldn’t customize it.

The Epicor installation consultants should carry a USB stick full of common BPMs and common Dashboards to get new customers up and running.

I know every business is different. I get it. But come on.

I really have no idea if other ERP’s are better. I’m sure they all have their pros and cons. I can’t imagine going through the pain of switching again.

If I could do it all over again, we should have sent some key team members to VISIT a few different other Epicor customers. It would have been good to get the real user experience, not just the dog and pony show from the Sales Team.

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That’s what I am saying Chris, I think all of us have learned our lesson about expectations and wish we would have done some more up front exploration/demoing.

I must say though, Epicor warts and all has helped us in the very way being discussed here. Bear with me.

It’s admittedly a mess, missing functionality you’d think is bone-basic.

However, what I think is missing is likely different from what you think.

And that’s The Thing.

Epicor gave us a baseline, so we could say what our PROCESSES were missing, in a common language as a delta from out-of-the-box Epicor.

Before, we had 20 different people with 20 different ways of describing process problems and 20 different ways of keeping records and implementing changes. We went quickbooks to Infor Syteline to Epicor and in my opinion Epicor - warts and all - is the best balance so far between flexibility and a basic structure.

We now have 20 managers using the same process language and gradually learning about the same 40-50 available building blocks to improve the business as it grows.

Of course, @KevinK is right, the whole industry is a mess and of course, Epicor’s service level does not attain to their price point; but it doesn’t really matter because there’s also no support hotline for “times have changed and my business is failing”. Adopting the necessary mindset to make an ERP work will give the team the same taking-responsibility mindset needed to keep the business going, a common language, and even a common enemy to boot.

FWIW we’re about 150 employees, 50 named users, 3 factories, mix of MTO, MTS, ETO and we gave up on CRM.

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Let’s go Steve, nice post.

I could not manage this system for our whole company by myself without this forum, that’s for sure.

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@SteveFossey - I COULD NOT AGREE MORE!!!

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