In the effort to learn from others in that case what is everyone’s plan to train users on the new view? I work at a paper company and we got some older folks over here that are terrified of change and learning, so I am writing SOPs for them, but I am a one-man army so it’s a rough battle, how are the rest of you preparing your users for the transition? Also, when is it happening, I think May? I see a few different dates from Epicor so I am a little confused on what to tell people.
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I would treat this like a pseudo-reimplementation. Don’t be a one man army.
Assuming you’re talking about transitioning to the Kinetic forms interface… I would get a champion from each key department.
Inform them this change is coming, nothing you can do to hold it back…
Train them, work with them on customizing the kinetic forms for their departments… get their buy-in and support. Having them work with you on customizing the forms (where applicable) promotes ownership with these department heads/champions.
Then, when it is ready, they can help you create end-user-procedures and training.
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I put the adaptable and positive employees on it as soon as possible, so when I started switching over the less capable they could help. No SOP just some quick training to show the analogies between classic and kinetic.
Then there was (is) a shared sheet for issues.
It was a bit like going over a speed bump too quickly, painful, and something might have fallen off the car but I don’t think it was too important.
There simply wasn’t resources and lower level buy in to do it more smoothly. Honestly management has been more supportive than the rank and file in most cases. If you are a one man show things do suffer a bit.
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Handholding and empathy I suppose.
I find the kinetic screens don’t take long to get used to. We prefer to the detail screens as opposed to lists (inorder entry for example), so “the click down in the related pages” thing gets old during training.
Send out some epicor videos on the navigation in trackers first, then train by role (AR, AP, Purch)
Microsoft Teams needs a pointer!!! Not those three dots, the other three dots!
The Dashboards are tougher to train on because the interface feels inconsistent compared to the smart client. Where’s the refresh button?
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Not the sober snowman, the drunken one.
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Imagine your Pilot environment is flipped to Linux without direct notification as to when it was being done…and any BPM/function in there is now largely nonfunctional…in the middle of testing 2025.2 before it goes live in two weeks (now one week).
Moanfest…yeah.
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Dang, I had no idea what a nest I was poking! I guess its not just me then! 
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Do Cloud customer get Live, Test and Pilot instances?
I would be going up the wall if my test environment changed on me with no notice while I was actually testing getting ready for go-live. Our on Prem pilot is changed on a whim tough. Test is only changed when we get an Ok from the team that any in progress work has been backed up and testing completed.
We get Live and Pilot. You can purchase additional.
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Hmmm, not liking the sound of that. Out of interest do they let you delay these updates or tell you about them?
Updates are announced in advance and on a schedule. Non-Production (Pilot and additional “Test” environments) get updated, then Production Environments. You can pay to “flex” your updates and delay them for a time, but eventually they are forced on you.
The updates impact the versions the environments are on. Not the data in each environment. You can push Live down to Pilot and/or Test whenever you want.
That’s what will overwrite any customizations that you may have been building in Test. So, you can allow Test to stay current as far as versioning, but you won’t want to write Live down to Test if you have active customization builds going on. That would blow them away.
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You can sign up for notifications at the Epicor Status page and they are at the top of the screen when you log into EpiCare. They aren’t very detailed and sometimes miss important information cough Linux Containers cough but are good to know when maintenance is occurring.
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Live and Pilot in the cloud for us. It wasn’t so much that they updated Pilot - it’s that they changed the actual environment that it runs in…and the changes caused significant issues with the Pilot testing.
Full disclosure - we had a conversation with Epicor on Friday and it looks like we found an acceptable path forward. I think they’ve also sent an email to all Flex 1 customers affected by it…or at least that’s how it came across.
I’ll burn them when deserved…but I’ll give them props when they earn it too.
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Except when Epicor is doing maintenance on any environment anywhere in the world. Then all CMP functions are disabled.
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It’s great to be a paying alpha/beta tester! I always expect to do this for paid software as quality assurance and pride in a working product has gone the way of the dodo bird since everything seems to be disposable in today’s world and have zero longevity. Seems the only thing companies see is how can we increase revenue streams without consideration of their customers.
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By very definition that is they changed the pilot system. Im all for docker, really it’s great, but it should have gone to some opt-in alpha users first or for much longer. Pilot does really need to be stable if your going though an update and epicor have just pushed out 2025.2. None of these things should have been done around the same time even to pilot. It’s a disappointing look TBH.
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