Fully 100% agree with @MikeGross & @Ernie on this.
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Thanks for the advice @MikeGross, @Doug.C and Ernie. I am heading up our internal ‘ERP’ team and appreciate your recommendations about involving staff who know our processes inside and out, and have influence to retool processes when needed.
This next comment is ERP system agnostic. Company Culture plays a very large part of the success of an implementation.
If everyone is ready to embrace change and a new system, review how they can adapt their current work practices to improve then you are on a winner. If people don’t, then it can be a pretty hard battle.
As ERP leader it is vital that you have backing of Management and the mandate for change.
The thing I’ve found about ERP implementations is that you find about a lot about the business, the people and most of all about yourself… It would be interesting to reflect on how you view things between the start of the project and at the end.
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A lot of truth in your comment, Hally. I’ve experienced it here firsthand. Due to inter-company resistance, our implementation has languished. The root cause is we don’t understand our procurement methods (or agree on them), so we keep coming up with excuses as to what nuance an item has that disqualifies it for Epicor planning.
Fortunately, I’m retiring really soon, so it won’t be my problem much longer. I fully understand that when I leave the system will be basically turnkey, but due to the inter-company resistance, without someone taking up the cause, it’s all going to fall apart rapidly. When I leave, the entire building will be planning and scheduling properly, which will be the case for at least a week - maybe two weeks - after I’m gone.
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@ZanebK - Welcome! I’ve been the internal point person on two implementations. It’s critical to get both mgmt backing for the ERP project as well as a lead from each process (department) that will have the time to do this. None of this “We’ll figure it out as we go” when folks don’t have time to breathe with their daily job, let alone another large project. Someone else will need to pick up the slack as folks get assigned to the ERP upgrade (and it’s not just the 2 hour weekly progress meeting! You actually need them to spend time testing, training, cleaning up). Be realistic with your implementation schedule. For our first one, we thought we could do it in 6 months, but it took 18. 2nd acquisition we knocked out much faster since most folks on the implementation team already had experience with Epicor.
We found having the Education Environment really valuable, and having everyone on the ERP project do the basic quote to cash training so you can see how everything is inter-related.
Epicor is SUPER customizable, but just because you can, doesn’t mean you always should.
Every additional module you get will need time to train and implement. Be realistic on how much time you’ve got with your team.
Clean up data! If you’ve got 12 years of history (and often junk too), now’s your chance to clean it up. Duplicate customers, vendors who’ve changed names, operation standards that aren’t accurate, etc… If there are standards you want to improve with the new ERP, enforce them during your data migration. We did a few practice upgrades, and every time found more data to clean up, but the final GoLive went very smoothly. If you go live with bad data, odds are it will be there a year later, since the first year will be a lot of learning, fixing, and adjusting.
Be careful with sales territories. If you don’t need them, but someone assigns one, then you will then be required to use them going forwards (that might be a good customization to hide those fields from the start).
Units of Measure can be tricky and are a pain to fix. Get it right through testing, and LIVE will go well.
Create testing plans that cover all of your unique scenarios, so when you go LIVE, you aren’t under pressure to figure out how to do something new on day one while everyone else is also scrambling.
Have your CAM send your implementation team to the Insights conference next year in Nashville (May 23-26?). It’s well worth it, and you will learn a ton. Once you have a year of LIVE under your belt, the conference will be even better since you’ll understand more, and will have your own list of unique situations you’d like to improve.
Good luck!
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Epicor, I think is a great program, with lots of customization, but I concur, you need a team of people that want to adopt and understand it and have the patience to learn new skills. This team also needs to express their adoption in positive terms to all other employees, especially the thick headed ones.
I am going to be pretty critical of Epicor here because although I now love it, They do a lot of things that I think are just BS and I would want anyone to be prepared for what actually happens during sales - implementation.
We implemented about a year ago, and we actually worked directly with Ernie, he was great. Unfortunately for Ernie, he has to try to make Epicor do what the salesman promised, and deal with a guy like me who is ready to get it done, with what the sales guy said it would do. He became a bit of a scapegoat for Epicor because the first few addon modules did not work at all as described and that was incredibly frustrating. We evaluated 12 different ERP software, and I do think we picked the right one in the long run, BUT the sales people at Epicor are great at selling you on stuff that you don’t need, but oddly not great at selling the stuff you do need; and then the implementers have to do their best to live up to that salesman promise. Some of the things we wanted, (like payroll) Epicor claimed they did, and did well, and when we went to implementation, it did NOT do it well because we couldn’t track accruals, or time off calculations. We really thought we would be able to get rid of our timeclock and payroll services, to combine all in one nice neat package, but it did not do the basics of what those softwares do. Maybe a much more expensive module would, but I don’t trust it. My experience with this: Once you license a module, it is incredibly hard to “return” it, and I probably ruined someone’s day with all the yelling I had to do just to get it done. To me, they sold me something that does not do what it promised. So my suggestion is to purchase the basics, ask for demos of the modules specifically, and do not purchase them until you know they will work. And get a demo from someone who actually uses that module.
Ernie and the rest of our implementers had a “path to success” timeline, which is good as a guideline, but sometimes I think it hindered moving the process forward faster. I can see why it exists, but for us, I was basically working on the implementation full time which I am guessing is not the norm, and I also am not afraid to hit buttons and read tech manuals so I was ready to keep building it. Ernie can attest, we had some “choice” times where I wanted to move to the next thing, and there were many things I wanted done now that Ernie thought should be part of the next phase, But I was also humbled at the complexity and time it did take to get the thing up and running, and Ernie was not wrong about holding back a bit.
For something they did not sell me, but they should have, especially since I asked and asked for it, is the warehouse interface. We asked for barcode ability, and scanning of inventory movements, and although Epicor does this “out of the box”, it does not do it well in it’s natural state. It was worth every penny to add on the Epicor mobile warehouse, and a bolt on software called bartender. It is SO much easier to create product labels that auto print with this setup, then it is to use the SSRS reports, especially because we are cloud based. If you want to track inventory movements via a scan tool, print product labels for your parts, and not deal with ssrs reports for that function Look into this add on.
Kinetic is… well… almost good. Many of the screens are much faster and there are somethings that do work better in it. It is also what the web login uses so knowing them is a must, BUT there are some screens that are just easier in classic views, like Purchase suggestions. My main issue with kinetic, it seems like every time they do an update, we get a massive bug or we loose customization.
Currently, we have a bug where our shop floor personnel will log into a job via the data collection station, and if it is not the first job they clock into for the day, it will error and they cannot clock into it. All the data that is in the screen is actually for the previous job they were working on (even though they clocked out of it), and to fix it, they have to do a full clock out, clock in, start production. It is SUPER annoying and so far tech support does not seem to understand how much of a problem it is (and that it is a new problem that never happened before). It took 2 days and an escalation in the case to get them to at least try to figure out what was going on, and now it seems like it is “going thought the channels” for the next release. I can tell you, if this continues for the next 4 months, I will have to yell again to express my frustration with it. I can’t be the only one with this problem. It is really difficult to get employees on board with Kinetic, and then every 6 months have to revert back to classic because the kinetic is broken. However, I would still recommend your train in Kinetic screens so you don’t know what you are missing with the classic screens.
Tech support is pretty good. I like having a help desk, and i have used it a number of times. It can just be slow, and sometimes I feel that the tech support teams don’t have a clue how damaging some of these bugs can be to a business, and how they need to step it up and resolve them faster. I have had some cases get resolved incredibly fast, with a phone call an hour after I put in the case, Remote session, and fix, But other times, its like pulling teeth to get them to understand the problem, and how horrible it is.
Understand planning time fences, days of supply, and parameters that will affect your po suggestions. We still struggle with this a lot and it can be kind of hard to explain. For some reason, Epicor thinks it is a good idea to give you 2 different screens for Purchasing. One called “Change suggestions” and one called “purchase suggestions”. Then it seems to double up what you are supposed to do with a part that didn’t make its required by date, by having it in the purchasing suggestion again and also in the change suggestion as “expedite”. For example, If you order a product today, and the po says it is supposed to be here tomorrow, but it doesn’t make it, it will create another po suggestion for another one, and a change suggestion to expedite it. If you follow both, you basically will have ordered it twice. It has caused us to order the same thing twice numerous times. I honestly wish I could just turn off the change suggestion feature right now so if a part is on order, and there is no other demand, it will stay off the suggestion board, but I can’t. So we set up time fences to try to eliminate this, but it still generates change suggestions to “add more” to an existing PO if more demand happens. we hate that, so to resolve it we go lock the quantity on the po, but that has other negative things as well. it has been probably the most frustrating thing to get right out of all daily operations. It is especially tough now because all of our lead times have nearly trippled from normal with all the supply shortages, and that is causing all sorts of “expedite” suggestions even though we cannot “expedite” from a manufacturer.
Finally, if I were you, I would force your implementers to teach you the BAQ feature, and DMT. They actually use it a lot themselves, but it is not something we ever went over. Oddly, I learned how to use the BAQ with the Epicor mobile warehouse folks, and the credit card processing folks, and DMT by trial and error. Now I use them every day. Learning these tools also really helps advance knowledge of how to configure your SSRS reports, create data directives, and configure report data definitions.
I am sure any other ERP software would have had the same challenges, and I would just be prepared for them. Epicor has pretty solid support, good implementing partners, and the software will do everything you need in a manufacturing environment, just be realistic about the challenges of implementation and that you will need to license more modules to get it all to work the way you need, and be prepared for it to take WAY longer then you might expect.
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@ZanebK
I have been working with Epicor for a long time as a customer and a consultant and customer again. I will tell you the Signature Methodology sounds cumbersome but it really just follows basic project management principals. I highly recommend following this path.
Too many customers miss the importance of the self paced foundation education. Don’t make this mistake. It’s function is not to make you an expert, instead to educate your team on the opportunities the software offers be educated consumers when your consulting team works through mapping processes and data with you.
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Yes! You have two options: (1) Learn BAQs; or (2) Fail completely at implementation.
To your comments regarding purchase suggestion and their interpretation, I would strongly advise you to make every person in the building involved in procurement to learn how to understand time phase inquiry.
Through that one screen, you can understand what Epicor is trying to do, and decide what is the best course of action. As an example, yesterday we got a suggestion to increase a PO quantity by three pieces. We can’t do that, the lead time is too great, so we added the pieces to a later release for the item. What Epicor suggested made sense in terms of the manner the system is functioning, it just wasn’t possible in the real world.
Here’s a typical example of a time phase screen that is instructing us on the correct activity, but should be interpreted differently when communicating with a supplier.
Epicor wants us to reduce a PO quantity by 4 pieces, and increase a later delivery by 8 pieces. An exercise in futility, as the increase is driven by a minimum on hand quantity of 8. If we do nothing, there is no real effect on planning.
We find it helpful to view a part in Time Phase, turn suggestions off and evaluate the part’s status. From that point, you can tell if the suggestions are meaningful, or just Epicor hyper-managing the inventory levels.
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We use time phase all the time for this, and we have had to learn some lessons on this, but we are making it work. It is just annoying when you have 200 suggestions for the day on parts, and you have to filter out the ones that are technically duplicates. Locking qty really helps, and setting up time fences has also significantly helped.
We also picked the worst time to learn this and how Epicor works suggestions. The pandemic has really injected a variable on lead time that we were not expecting which is causing all sorts of changes and suggestion issues we were not prepared to monitor or knew how to process. If it was on 1 part, whatever, but it has affected 70% of parts we order. If we had maybe 6 months more under our belts of using epicor before the pandemic started messing with lead times, I think we would have been able to process the changes better. Now we are just on our heals trying to learn the right approach to rescheduling jobs, change suggestions, increase lead times that put suggestions historically, and maintaining stock that is simply not available. I have lost a lot of hair this year:)
I’ve had two experiences with deploying Epicor. One was an upgrade from E9 to E10 where, to the extent possible, we ported everything verbatim from E9 to E10. Then we set about fixing issues in the implementation. There were many. Having never worked with E9, I don’t know which ones were introduced by the upgrade and which had been lurking for years. For example, we had a decade-old BPM with a comment attributing it to someone with an epicor.com email address. That BPM updated the DB directly and called Db.SaveChanges(). I don’t know if that was ever good practice, but it certainly wasn’t by the time of E10. This BPM was used as a template for many others, which proved to be a source of major problems. (Because BPMs run in a pseudo-transaction, calling Db.SaveChanges() causes database deadlock.)
Then I was brought in on a from-scratch deployment that I’m told has been dragging out for over two years. Epicor has this thing about latching onto the tail end of failed ideas and not letting go. Low-code/no-code is one of those failed ideas. Cloud is another. Not having access to the database for ad hoc queries and SSRS reports is extremely limiting. Not having access to the Admin Console is downright crippling. Needing to put in a support ticket to restart the app server (which is at least a monthly need, if not weekly, or up to several times a day when something is misconfigured) could mean days of downtime in production for something that should take thirty seconds. I’m going to push hard to switch to on-prem before we actually go live.
Thanks so much for the in depth reply @recelect - this is extremely valuable insight. Your experience has definitely emphasised the need to check and re-check the quoted modules list against our functional requirements.
@KevinK Thanks for your reply. This is interesting to me, as we’re opting for Cloud deployment with the promise that we will be able to create the ad-hoc queries and reports we need. Are you finding that the Rest API and BAQ queries are not sufficient? Could you also elaborate on the need to restart the App Server? Is this when you are applying configuration changes?
Answering everyday business questions with a BAQ requires more steps and is many times slower (in terms of developer time) than just hopping into SSMS and whipping something out. And there are some things that are difficult or impossible to do with BAQs. Look for the big thread on here about CTEs. Reports are still SSRS, but you won’t have access to the SSRS web interface, so you won’t be able to create reports that can be run or scheduled from there.
You need to restart the app server when a task gets stuck or crashes. This can happen because of bugs in a customization or bugs in Epicor. Canceling the task often doesn’t work.
Last week, Regenerate Configurator was failing with a socket timeout. I found a Knowledge Base article describing other tasks failing with an identical error message. The suggested solution involved restarting the app server, so I had to put in a support ticket. Over 24 hours later, it turned out that restarting the app server didn’t even solve the problem.
Another example: a multi-company configuration would be the intended way to set up Epicor to match how our company operates in reality. But the task that enterprises configurators between companies kept locking up and preventing any other tasks from completing. We needed to restart the app server multiple times a day. The problem was escalated as far as it could go, and Epicor still couldn’t tell us why the task kept locking up. Without access to the server, we were helpless. We ended up switching to a single-company configuration. We’re making progress with configurators now, but still haven’t figured out how we’re going to get the accounting side to work correctly.
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I don’t know other ERP systems, and doing traces in Epicor can be a slog, but as a die-hard low-coder, I am really happy with all that I am able to do, especially since Functions came along. I have done several integrations by myself (with lots of research on this site, of course), and that’s really saying something.
With no outside help and no inside help, I have done the following with low-coding in the last two years:
- Get an ecommerce store integration running (I did the Epicor part; the store is run by someone else); it’s been taking large real orders for almost a year now
- Created a time entry app with Power Apps and Power Automate that we use every day here (it creates real labor entries in Epicor)
- Tulip integration, pulling job BOM info to the production floor and marking ops as complete
- Working on this BPM right now
- And various other projects
I mean, that’s pretty cool.
Ha, you know, the funny thing is, the one and only thing we actually had to outsource in the last four years was a customized SSRS AR Invoice form. THAT was the one thing I couldn’t handle. Ugh that form is just awful. To your point, though, I could make what we needed myself from scratch, but it just would not have been THE ARForm that comes up when you do Print Invoice(s) in the Actions menu.
Edit: I can’t read, retraction in later post.
Agreed. We were multi-tenant SaaS (which is no longer available for new customers, I hear) when we first launched and it was AWFUL. Crippling problems every week. We outgrew their horsepower in a few months after going live. Could not convince Support that MRP was failing at EXACTLY 9 hours every time, as if there was some web config setting that was stopping it (ahem). So frustrating to know the problem and not be able to fix it.
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SSMS is SQL Server Management Studio, not to be confused with SSRS. It’s basically a SQL IDE (actually a plugin for VS) that helps design a DB schema. But it’s also great for exploring an existing schema and rapidly developing queries. And you can’t use it on cloud. I tried using an ODBC connector to bridge between SSMS and cloud, but it’s ridiculously slow, and you have to create a separate virtual server for every table. We had some complex SSRS reports that took months to develop and debug with the help of SSMS. Without SSMS, I expect they would have taken years.
Ohhhhhhh. Stupid mistake on my part. I misread it.
Just curious what complex means in your case?
e.g. lots of options, BOM’s/BOO’s with many of components/levels, extended build times, etc…
@bordway Yes, that’s correct. We produce hydraulic subsea equipment and a typical BOM goes 4 or 5 levels deep, with hundreds of manufactured sub-assemblies and component parts. Overall leads times are 25-30 weeks for our most complex products, due to long lead times for key materials and an intricate design / manufacturing process.
We also have lots of product variations, due to our clients’ needs, which result in new/bespoke Assembly BOMs being generated for almost every new order.
OK, (my experience is that) Epicor support (and most 3rd parties) can help you the basics, for widget production but… the help field starts to thin out as you move towards the capital equipment end of the spectrum. Finding answers to some of the puzzles related to MRP, scheduling, methods of manufacture, purchasing suggestions might be a challenge, depending on what resources you already have internally.
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Just had one of these today. Somehow a fuel hose slipped through the cracks and we’re measuring it in Eaches instead of Feet, and have been since the very beginning… and I suspect we will continue to measure in each forever, because it’s a pain to try to change. Easier to just make a new part number and do a mass replace… assuming you don’t have a ton of racks/bins to relabel.
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