I forgot to mention one of our big admin projects that may sound small but will have a big impact on our company.
The problem is that Windows/MS and Epicor have completely separate credentials with no way to really, truly link these together. Being in a regulated industry, we need to have username/password checks at various stages in our process in order to be compliant with 21 CFR Part 11. Epicor can be easily configured to prompt for a password, but even with SSO, this will always be the Epicor password with no way to “passthrough” for the windows credentials of the user. This leads to our users having different passwords for windows and Epicor which can cause issues.
With some help from this forum, I believe we have a way to leverage Azure AD configurations inside Epicor to prompt for the Azure credentials instead of the Epicor credentials. This does require some code be added to the screens where this prompt is required, but will be huge in truly linking our users credentials. My only wish was that there was more out of box configuration to do this. There’s a way to link Azure AD to Epicor with configuration, but no deeper user configuration after that point.
We actually looked at DocStar, Docuware, and one other document management system. The project stakeholders liked the UI of docuware the most, and we have a long term relationship with our reseller from other projects and demos in the past.
From a technical side it is about the same to work with as DocStar, the built in functionality is pretty much the same, the workflow designer operates like every other workflow designer, etc.
The integration was the easiest part of the project really, our process was manual and undocumented so the hardest work was documenting the whole AP process, mapping everything out, and defining what the workflows need to be for all the different conditions.
Yes, the ROI was / is a winner. We were able to move those free hours to other more valuable tasks, and now we have a solution that will scale with our growth without significantly increasing the load for our Accounting department.
Nice… how far things have come.
I still keep my SNP adapter handy though, just in case. I think it was one of Horner’s first really successful products.
Mass ECO-Part-Checkout & Mass ECO Update - These applications have been delivered to multiple customers where they have a large number of parts to revise.
The MASS Checkout application allows for:
Automatic creation of the ECO Group (if not already existent).
mass creation of new revisions
mass checkout of those new revisions
automatic “Get details” from the old revision to the new revision
These four steps, which can take quite some time to do manually, just a few seconds per part (depending on the size of the BOM to “get details” from), saving engineering literally hours when checking out 100s of parts.
the MASS EDIT allows
the engineer to update material lines or operations for many parts at a time (once they are checked out to the ECO Workbench).
This modification is JUST LIKE they edited them one at a time (ie… it is NOT like the “Mass Replace” feature).
USE EXAMPLE< we used this to update 100s of parts that had the same exact operation so that they had less time on the operation.
Yes… both of these applications COULD have been done with DMT, but instead, we made an application that does this within the Epicor framework, and withing Epicor security. The users can use the grid view to copy/paste data into.
Centralized Engineering in Epicor with Parts, Revisions, ECOGroups being managed at Global Company. Then Local Companies who have the Part Linked get Synced and there are options to manually Pull Revisions down (Sync Down).
It was a long year long effort to hash out bugs and honor PartPlant settings among other things.
If a ECO Group had Parents or Children (Materials, Phantoms, Sub Assemblies etc) it would also bring them down, with the Revisions, Link them among other things… Multi-Level.
It was used on Fire Truck BOMs which are huge. It handled the beating.
@Edge
We had a request about nesting recently. Finding a way to get MRP to call out the nest as a partnumber but not have a material requirement on the job for the nest part number. The requester kept mentioning how they were able to do it in a previous system with a part type. I was wasnt able to find anything on a creative way of doing it in epicor.
You may contact me directly. it is not a “standard” module, and in nearly every case, i have had to customize it because the users had UD Fields that they want to incorporate into the process.
The engine will orchestrate many calls into one. It’s durable so each call will persist until you interact. We’ve included SMS and email webhooks for extended workflow actioning. Ideally I’d like epicor to have its own web hooks that I can interact with but I’ve worked round this for now.
The engine itself has a premium connector for powerapps similar to the dynamic 365 connectors which are mapped to business objects. CRM , sales order, quote , purchase. A swagger page is present for each object so the calls are very easy to make. Odata style.
You can build a powerapp, that will create an epicor transaction in about 5-10 mins with no code.
It’s great for rapid prototyping and the architecture is scalable so we can pop a ui on it when your happy with the functionality. Or just leave in power apps if it’s just for a couple of users.
Longer term I will be mapping these elements to the process mining model i have, so you can build an instant business case for automation and then quickly automate with a flow or mobile app. We can then mine the new process to ensure the envisioned gains are achieved.
I’m hoping to achieve what uipath are doing but solely for epicor.
And the other half of this is deep linking so apps can return to the object that raised the event. It should be a side-effect of Kinetic and I’m looking forward to it.
I read that this is restricted to internal use only. What version will this be available for external use. I need cdc for process mining and have considered building my own model.
Tim,
Does this or can it also mass edit/replace attachments? We are attaching specifications to our parts in the Workbench and right now if a spec gets change either revision or a completely new spec number we will have check out each part, and delete the old spec and add the new spec along with the new spec title. I know this could also be done with a DMT but I would like to stay away from that if possible. If not is there another way of doing this? I know I can use the mass replace to change from the old to the new when the spec has been replaced with a new spec but it only works on the BOM, not the attachments.
