First off this is my first time touching the Epicor software. I come from a decade of SAP hair pulling. I have come on board to drive the set up and ERP system with a new start up who has a sister company that currently is running Epicor (set up years ago and not utilized 100%). I want to make this as simple as possible to be used without people wanting to bring in 15 third party systems to do what Epicor can do if utilized correctly. 99% will be engineered to make products and mostly each with their own project assigned. Does anyone have any advice or checklist for this implementation process. (We will be using Epicor as the team with their consultants for the set up).
Welcome to more hair pulling ! This is a pretty broad question. It’s great that the target is out of the box Epicor based processes. I’m not sure of any concrete implementation checklists, but the online help is pretty good, and some give you a processes/setup overview of how the module works and interacts with the system.
Surely it can’t be as bad as that . I have been digging through their learning center videos for the last 2 weeks 10 hours a day and while all of it is great tools to see how each step should function, I feel like I am missing the core base data portions or maybe I am just stuck in the mindset of other systems.
They are still building the team from their side of consultants, so the only thing I have managed to get into is the pilot system which I have just been able to use for the hands-on lessons from the learning center and Epicweb. I know good and well implementations have more timeline than what most end users think is far too long but I still want to be as ahead of the game as possible to cut down timelines. The kicker which is going to help and hinder me is everything is still new so there’s no bad habits to essentially break, however there is not a lot of data to go off either. This could also help in trying to make the operations function closer to the baseline of Epicor and require lest customizing to prevent bugs and issues down the road.
Your Epicor PM should also be setting you up with access to the Master Project Tracker. It’s now in SmartSheet, and has a sheet for Functional Setup which might give you some of the info you are looking for.
I implemented Epicor at our company 5 years ago - we’re still learning new things every day…and if I had a dollar for every time someone said “in the old system, we could blah blah blah” or “this takes too many clicks”, I could happily retire!
This sounds like a good plan. Projects are nothing special and yet… are. It is the one entity that has a reference field in like every other entity. POs, sales orders, jobs – all can tie to the Project.
You can recognize revenue to the Project itself, but there is no need to if you are willing to use some BAQs and dashboards.
If you are hoping to never make a BAQ, well… you’d be the first company to do so, I imagine.
Kinetic is one-size-fits-all, so you know the cliche – it fits no one perfectly without tailoring.
I don’t know that there’s a one size fits all implementation checklist. Your business needs and the modules you end up implementing will affect what you need to do. As a start I would recommend you take a look at the user admin guide and other resources on EpicWeb. (ask your account manager if you don’t have access yet).
Having a good consultant on board (or someone with Epicor experience) will be a huge help.
The consultant that acts as your implementation lead will take you through all of the steps in the proper order. Because they lead implementations for a living, their checklist is going to be much more beneficial for you than other users can provide who’ve went through implementations periodically. It’s not just a matter of what needs to be setup and configured, but how it needs to be set up and configured to accommodate your business’s specific needs.
In that regard, know what you need the ERP to do; as that will drive both how you set things up, and ensure you test accordingly. The number one issue with implementations (after lack of end user training) is not configuring and implementing Epicor properly in the first place.
I came to a company that implemented Epicor two years prior, from a legacy system that wasn’t fully being utilized either. Not knowing what they actually needed from the ERP resulted in a vastly underutilized and under-configured implementation. The lead consultant was asking them how they needed things, they didn’t understand what was needed, general explanations and ill-advice, and even though the consultants recommended not going live, they went live anyway. They had been playing catchup ever since. Even when they hired me, and I started pointing out things that needed to be done, they were reluctant to change anything. I’m finally making decent progress in getting things functional on the operations side of things.
Second, avoid demands to customize Epicor to be just like your legacy system. In the end you will end up having to strip out those customizations, and it will cause you all kinds of headaches until you realize the customizations must go. Learn Epicor first, before you customize anything. Customizations should enhance the dataflow and utilization, not circumvent or override it.
This post rings very true. I’m at my second company doing an Epicor implementation in the last 5 years. One went live about 2 years ago, and the other is set to go live in about a month.
At both companies, the biggest struggle hasn’t been Epicor itself, but the lack of process mapping and the willingness to question what doesn’t make sense. Too often, we work around the way a system is designed to function—not because the system is flawed, but because change is uncomfortable.
Change naturally makes people think, “What about me?” In the legacy system, I did X, but now in the new system that task is partially automated or handled by others. Suddenly, there’s hesitation: I don’t trust others to do this. I’ve owned it, I understand it. These new people don’t.
And time and again, instead of fixing the root cause, companies slap on a bandaid. But when implementation comes, the real value of the system often requires fixing those underlying problems. Without that step, many of the gains Epicor can deliver are left on the table.
! This is a pretty broad question. It’s great that the target is out of the box Epicor based processes. I’m not sure of any concrete implementation checklists, but the online help is pretty good, and some give you a processes/setup overview of how the module works and interacts with the system.
. I have been digging through their learning center videos for the last 2 weeks 10 hours a day and while all of it is great tools to see how each step should function, I feel like I am missing the core base data portions or maybe I am just stuck in the mindset of other systems.
