Question for you all - we found a possible missing feature in the browser. it was actually something that very few of us remember actually being there. the feature is a “Quick Customer entry” program in both the Quote and Order screens. This option is in the Actions menu in the smart client where it offers up a mini-customer entry screen for you to quickly add a new customer without all the additional fields.
Turns out that we did bring forward the menu option in the overflow, BUT all it does it launch the full customer entry screen.
SO… the question is:
Does anyone actually use this Quick Customer Entry application
Does anyone have an opinion about whether we should bring this same concept forward into the browser?
If we simply push the user to the full customer screen, does that cause anyone any grief?
NOTE: the PURPOSE for this feature was to allow a salesperson to create a new customer in a fairly restricted screen. This allows you to have an order entry person quickly put in that new customer, which would then need to be taken off hold and set a credit limit.
I could see this being a nice option in Quote Entry more so than Order Entry.
By the time we have an Order, our sales and finance teams should be doing the full blown Customer Entry.
But in quoting stages, it could be very nice to have an expedited process to get a “prospect” into the system to allow generation of a Quote. That being said, I realize each company will have different requirements here (minimum required fields/information). So, as long as that potential utility is customizable so we can choose what is important as a minimum level of information, that could be a very nice and well used tool.
If the actual Quick Customer Entry screen could be brought to Kinetic, that would eliminate a customization for us. I had to create this for Quotes, since this did not exist in the Kinetic web UI.
I never even noticed (or had anyone ask about) the Quick Customer Entry until earlier this year when I saw it in Kinetic and discovered there wasn’t much “quick” about it (as you said, full Customer entry screen). It is one of those features that you don’t think about until you REALLY would love to have the option.
Part Maintenance, Customer Maintenance, and Supplier Maintenance could all use a less-privileged short form, IMHO.
Longer term, if Epicor created a Wizard in Application Studio that let users create any short version of a form (and associated data view) then that would eliminate a lot of customizations!
In classic we actually block people from using that screen. We have a process to follow and UD fields and whatnot involved in creating a customer… there is no “shortcut version” for us.
We’re also trying to put more guardrails in for better Customer/Contact data (preventing duplicates, etc.) and have found success in limiting the obscure points of entry. For example, we blocked creating new contacts from Quote Entry People tab (which used to cause all kinds of bad data) and no longer let users in PerCon Maintenance menu. We keep folks in Customer Maintenance and that makes it easier to control bad data. Any user inconveniences are more than made up for by the better data they’re getting.
That said, I’m not against Quick Customer Entry in principle. We use Quick Job Entry all the time and it’s great.
