Kinetic ideas 50 idea limit frustration

:100:

I believe at this point that Kinetic is so underdeveloped that it is a bug in its entirety. I don’t care about it at this point. I have tried to use it, however it is a complete waste of time at this point. It’s a pointless time sink that I don’t have time for. I’m hoping that it becomes usable before we are forced to use it.

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Strong statement here Adam. Thanks for sharing.

I heard that in a TV reporter voice :laughing:

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I’m dead, HAHA :rofl:

History is repeating itself. When Epicor left the VB client for the .NET Client, it was not well-received. This is the same .NET Client that people don’t want to let go of now. Expect a bumpy ride. It will be better once we get there.

From 2009: Why have you not upgraded - Yahoo Archive - Epicor User Help Forum (epiusers.help)

Last November we did upgrade from Vantage 6.1 to Vantage 8.03.407. Things are working pretty much the same but I can tell you that Vantage 8.03 is about 10 times slower than 6.1. We bought a new 64-bit server with ample resources and even upgraded our network to Gigabit. We’ve replace most of our desktops with new PCs. It’s still WAY slower than 6.1. The interface is quite buggy too. During our implementation and training the Epicor consultants constantly said, “Save and save often!” They meant it.

What’s keeping us from upgrading to Epicor 9? Well we’ve only been on 8.03 for a short time and I’ve heard Epicor 9 is even slower than this version. If that’s true (we haven’t even tested it yet) we may never upgrade. If I throw more pain on our users they might decide to crucify me.

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:100: x 10000.

I’ve worked with Epicor since around 2006 and I’ve seen support cycle from fair, to pretty bad, to good, to really good and back more than once. Sadly we seem to be on the downslope these last few years.

While there has been improvements there is still a huge gap that needs to be tightened up to put Kinetic on-par with Classic.

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Like @Mark_Wonsil said, we know they are trying. This is a difficult changeover.

It will get up to speed eventually and we will love it when it does.

The issue (and fear) I have, is the screens that are working are not very usable. When redesigning the user experience, the flow of data and how it is consumed/entered should be taken into account. So even bug free, the new UX isn’t there yet either.

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I’m curious when you say not very usable - do you have examples? We haven’t started testing the kinetic screens yet but just looking at them it seems like it will be a lot easier to navigate than the mess of tabs within tabs within more tabs that exists in classic.

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I believe the #1 complaint that I got was in the Job Tracker. I didn’t use it much myself, but I was told it was very hard to navigate back and forth between the tabs to get the same information you used to be able to drill down into on one tab in the classic.

It’s been a while since I’ve been in Kinetic, so I don’t remember all of the details.

It’s going to be a change for sure and people don’t like change, the whole moving :cheese: and all that. Even the classic screens were many times said to be inefficient; “All the tabs and clicking plus the number of fields we don’t use…” is a pretty good summary of what I heard many times when customizing the classic forms.

The real issues I’d like to see addressed in Kinetic is the bugs; Not being able to adjust field sizes to accommodate the data, bugs and missing features in Application Studio, etc.

Interesting

Do you know if any of those issues got fixed in Kinetic 2021 (it looks like you are on 10.2.400?)

We’re in testing for 2021.2.x and we’ve ran into bugs but some are supposed to be addressed in 2022.x sometime at least if not already. Hoping we’ve hit bottom and the “support swing” is on the upward trend

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Yes, interesting. I find the Trackers the most useful screens in Kinetic. Less context menus (right clicking) to get to a lot of information:

Job Tracker in any version is a monster. I use it for sure (in classic), but I use Job Status Dashboard more often. If I am trying to figure out “what happened” – always the reason I’m in a tracker – then I’m looking for the needle in the haystack and I usually just need the data dump from Job Status.

So, remember when mobile websites were just a novelty for nerds? And we had always designed sites with the assumption that screens were at least 640 pixels wide and who on earth wants to scroll forever?

Now? Mobile sites are the norm; desktop sites are only for nerds, screens should be assumed as a maximum of 640 pixels wide and who on earth wants to click links - just let me scroll forever!

Ladies and gents, sometimes we lose the fight.

Kinetic is the future because it should be. It’s what our users want.

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I know but ow ow ow

I couldn’t find it but Jen the Marketing Chick user replacement issue on Spiceworks

Edit: and then I did.

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I think the most important thing is to get the help system to work the same, regardless of how you access it. In K22.2, it’s a mess. You need to open help from Epicor, search for something, open it, then in the Zendesk help, search for the same term again, and get the results you expected! Why can’t the client/browser search return that and save extra steps?

The other is to make it easy for EVERY epicor user to access ELC. Don’t require yet another login that most casual Epicor users will lose in the few months between watching/learning something new. Let us access it directly from Epicor, with the Epicor login (like Zendesk does now).

I think you could still share the links, it’ll just force the reader to log-in via Epicor to see them. If I open the link in a completely different browser (e.g. Edge instead of Chrome), then I get this ‘please login from Epicor’ screen first.

image

Ex: https://kinetichelp222.epicor.com/hc/en-us/articles/9682931830925-Running-the-Auto-Job-Completion-Process

Oh no, not that can of worms! Or dead horse? :slight_smile: Most 6 of us here don’t have any votes available, so we can’t vote for anything new or useful without giving back our vote on something else. We can still comment on the idea at least.
(Edit - Thanks for the data below @timshuwy! I bet all 6 have commented on this thread, he he).

Thank you for coming here and asking us for ideas! We are not shy about sharing how Epicor can be improved, that’s for sure. Let’s make it the best of breed!

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Like you, I don’t want to divert Kari’s post. However, I think the discovery methodology is quite suspect.

Give people 50 pieces of candy and many will save them like precious stones - not me mind you but many. If you said, “I’ll give you 50 more when you eat all 50…” then you would have a better view of which ideas are really important. Spreading 50 votes over 2000+ ideas cannot ever possibly measure true demand. Why 50? Why not 25? 10?

Ideation is different than backlog. Separate the two if you really want input from the users. There should be no limit to ideation. There can and should be limits to the backlog however.

One of the oldest ideas which has been in the top five for years has a status of “Gauging Interest”. If that’s the case, voting seems pointless. :person_shrugging:

Maybe we should enter ideas on the portal but not vote for anything. That would certainly stop the complaining on this topic!

:rofl:

Fin.

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