We are trying to reroute some of our processes to a more less paper path and I am looking at the tasks in epicor. I haven’t done much with them, but had some ideas on this and wanted some input.
Right now, the CSR takes the order and if/when it needs to be engineered, or something make sit go to Engineering, they physically get up and take the document to the Engineer and set it on their desk.
I would like to have them set a task in Epicor for the Engineer and let the engineer work of fof a Que. Can something like this be set up in Epicor?
It can but the way epicor sets up tasks is extremely confusing. We do exactly what you are talking about, but we use a platform called clickup.com . Before that we were on basecamp.com. I created some automations to make tasks in those platforms from epicor, first by sending e-mails combined with zapier, then switched over to REST since clickup has rest available. I works very well for us, and we don’t pass around paper orders anymore, plus you get all of the other stuff that comes with task tracking.
I am looking at the way Epicor does it and I really do not see anything that would qualify as a Que. At least nothing I have right now. Wondinerg if these tasks could be set up with DocSTar as I am pushing hard for this one as it will cover a lot of ground for us. We already have basecamp, but IA m not a fan of the program myself.
Are you on basecamp 2 or 3? In 2 we just had a project set up with the categories, and we just dragged tasks from one to the next as it went through the process. It worked ok. Pretty much just look for a digital scrum board and it will be the same thing. 3 doesn’t work as well for that kind of setup, and one of the reasons we went away from it.
I’m not 100% as it is used by HR for HR related things. I only see basecamp when I am needing to check off what was assigned to me. It may be a good product, but I do not think it is what we need to sue for this workflow. Do you think DocStar could fill in the gaps? I am looking to get this in the next few months or so and if it can, then that’s another plus to the board.
Check out clickup, you can make a free account, try it out and see if it does what you want. Basically you set up stations, and things move from one to the next. Honestly, just getting your people logged in and willing to use it will be the hardest part, because well…, people
We do something very similar and @Banderson is right - Epicor’s tasks are hard at best, and definitely clunky. Plus - and this is huge for us - they are NOT cross/multi company. My sales guys in the UK can’t send a task to my production guys in the USA (two different Epicor companies). I could do custom code, but I’m not there just yet. I keep holding out for Epicor to do the right thing.
Our CSR’s can route a quote to Accounting, Engineering, or Production (or others) as they see fit and we currently do that by having them just add the task to the quote. But since you have to tie that task to “someone” and we wanted them to be available in a ‘queue’ for our folks in those departments, we created a generic workforce id with the appropriate people as Authorized users. That allows each real person to open the Task List and show tasks for the generic person and process them like it was a queue. It’s pretty simple in the end. Couple that with some notifications and everyone is more or less happy, and we can track the ‘workflow’ of a quote inside Epicor by looking at the last active task for that quote.
We even did a custom BPM on Tasks to fill two UD fields with date/time created, and a dashboard for Tasks so we can sort/filter/prioritize them a little better based on product, customer, date/time in the queue, etc.
Is this view from epicor or within the clickup app?
I would be interested to use the gantt feature for some planning of resources (human ones) if it can be customizable enough (still to be looked at when time permits… )
looks promising…we mostly use SmartSheet for our big project planning…and moreover…a good reason to finally learn to use REST !!!
That’s from clickup. They have gantt charts but we aren’t good enough at date management to use them effectively.
Personally, I don’t really believe in Gantt charts anyway. A lot of wasted time guessing at something that’s wrong in the end. A better use of time is to work on the next thing in your Queue as efficiently as possible, finish it, then start the next thing.
and this book does a great job teaching scrum, but also just basic ideas about how to get stuff done.
And it nags people until they complete their tasks!
If MS gets their To-Do app together (and it’s getting there), users can look in one place for all items waiting on them whether it’s an Outlook Task or a Planner Task.
I think the integration of Epicor and all things web will get much better when they get to WebHooks. You can use MS Graph to control all things O365. If one were to subscribe to Tasks in Epicor, they would publish their activity (CRUD) and O365 would do something with it. Vice versa, an O365 event that use REST to update Epicor. The best integrations are loosely coupled!!!
Does O365 use rest? What kind of API do they have available? I can get epicor to talk pretty easily now, since I know it. Other things, I have a harder time with. Clickup has pretty basic REST, and soon they should have some more advanced stuff.
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