I just thought I’d pass along some of my “experiences” with the new functionality relative to the Customer Inactive flag. At long last we’ve now got the capability to set a customer as Inactive (yee haw!!!) as of Epicor 2021.2.11 (our currently installed release). However, it appears they didn’t modify the classic Customer UI to expose that new checkbox - you can only see it on the Kinetic version. BUT when using the classic version of the Customer UI a search will not provide visibility to inactive customers. A predictive search will find it and you can enter the custID and it will come back but if you try to search it looks like it’s not in the database. In the Kinetic version of Customer Maintenance you have a filter for “All”." Inactive", “Active” and it all works as it should.
The next little tidbit of info is that the DMT appears to consider Inactive customers as non-existent. I built a BAQ to extract a set of data formatted as needed to match with a DMT template, modified the single column which I’m blanking out, loaded it to the DMT template and I get a bunch of errors saying the CustNUMCustID is not valid. I know it exists because I extracted it from the database and checked to see that they exist. First off, I couldn’t find them with a search (see above) and then finally deduced that the ones which errored out all had been inactivated earlier. SOOOOO my conclusion is that for some reason the DMT tool is structured to ignore any customer which is set to inactive. This would probably not be a problem in most instances unless you wanted to create a DMT to mass activate a set of customers.
As I have found out, there are a number of issues with the Kinetic version at our release level (trust me I’ve raised enough issues with Epicor support where the answer is “fixed in the 2022 version” to fill Lake Superior) that perhaps some or all of these “findings” may have already been addressed and you (hopefully) won’t be experiencing any of this but in the event you do - I’ve saved some hair-pulling, wall-pounding frustration.
I feel your pain. I am not even live yet a year after starting implementation. Core functions like freighting shipments and adding documents are still unresolved issues that the system simply cannot do in its current state. In this last year I have had at least 60 support cases and the only resolution I’ve ever gotten is “It’ll be fixed in the next release”. Of which they do not tell you when that’ll be. Epicor sold us a bed of lies and put the onus of bug fixing on its user base. Shameful and frankly embarrassing for a billion dollar company.
Epicor has said that any "NEW’ functionality will NOT be back ported to classic. (Now they may change their tune on this given the recent news of them pushing the 2024 timeline but at the moment that’s their stance. New features in the UX only). You can however modify the screen and make the checkbox visible and modify the quick search to accomplish the same thing.
True, you could build out a customization for this but it still wouldn’t resolve the inability to find those in a search (probably wouldn’t want to anyway - lol). The posting was more of a fyi in the event someone else stumbled upon the same situation and would spend time trying to figure out what I have already discovered.
The inability to modify any of the inactive customers in DMT does seem to be a potential problem though. Once inactivated you are only able to manually re-activate a customer account so be careful with mass inactivations because if you mistakenly go too far you can’t just say “oops, I’ll just reactivate” because it won’t let you. Just a guess is that it uses a std search to find the custID and can’t because the search is likely defaulted to active customers only.
I used to work at Epicor in the customization group and it’s a mantra which has been out there for a long time. If support can’t duplicate the issue in the current release they merely push back and say “it works in the current release”. They would occasionally do a one-off hot-fix for your release if it wouldn’t involved too much retrofitting - especially if it was a show-stopper with your business process.
Epicor is VERY robust and flexible - much more so than say SAP. I had the opportunity to chat with a SAP sales rep a few years back and he confirmed what I had heard - in order for a SAP implementation to be most successful you need to change how your business processes work to fit the software because it’s not designed to be easily customized. If you were trying to implement SAP you’d probably be only a year into a four or five year implementation schedule. Epicor/Kinetic has it’s bugs (as all software does) but once you get it established and customized to fit your business process needs you’ll find it’s a powerful tool. I’m just getting into EDA (Phocus data cube) and it’s fantastic. I could spend the next two or three months just playing, customizing the sync’s and building out presentation dashboards for use by our executive staff - it’s a blast!
Hi. I get that at its core Epicor is “good software”. I’ve just been shielded from experiencing this dealing with kinetic bugs for the last year. I mean we were never shown the classic UI during the sales pitches and then I find out about it after the fact that kinetic is brand new and we should just use the classic ui for a while. Its just not ethical in my opinion and dealing Epicor they just write off my very real and critical UI issues which is beyond frustrating. I’m more scared of sporadic bugs as they are impossible to fix.
This is deja vu for me. My first experience with with Epicor was with Vantage 8. This was the release that replaced the VB client with the current DOTNET client. You can still search the Yahoo! group feed saved here in this group. Like you, we only had the new UI and we’re listening to previous customers talk about how great VB screens were. Back then, there was no ability to run either UI. It was all DOTNET and trust me, it was not as stable as it is today.
I’ve seen Epicor navigate the user base throughout several tech stack changes. They are not painless to be sure, but eventually they do smooth out. We’ll be screaming for Kinetic when they introduce the Metaverse client.
From what I have seen and heard Kinetic wasn’t ready for prime time release when it went out the door. If you have a release anything less than 2022 I would suggest just focusing on implementing the Classic version and once you’re up and running you can circle back to bridge to Kinetic when the time is right. It helps that Epicor has decided to push out the sunset by a year (and possibly more?). It’s a bit more of a pain for your functional base to be subjected to three different presentations and/or software (legacy, Epicor classic and Kinetic) in say a 4 year period but I think you’ll have a lot less headaches if you just focus on getting classic version up and running. For the most part that version executes on all cylinders and has only a few bugs (as you’ll always have).
A chunk of us here, myself included, have been in controlled releases and pre-betas for the Kinetic UI. I assure you they have been listening. Turn on Kinetic in 10.2.500 and take it for a spin, that was the first… I’ll call it POC release already a year after some of us had seen it. It’s rough.
It has come a long way, is the go-forward plan, and sales representing anything but the kinetic UI would be silly. It’s not going to get better without real users kicking the tires on it day after day. It would have stayed in beta forever. There comes a shit or get off the pot moment, and that will always be painful.
The thing to consider before you march down the classic UI path is any customizations you’ll have to re-do. Training and internal documentation rebuilt.
I would add that Kinetix UX while still young and has bugs it has nearly 100% coverage functionality wise at least in the 2022+ releases. It isn’t perfect, but it has improved a lot.
If you are in <= 2021 flavor I recommend upgrade and get to 2022 hang in there. They do listen
