I like to peruse the Epicor-related message boards on a semi-regular basis. Usually, I’ll find something nice, and occasionally I can help someone with a problem they’re having.
Sometimes, a poster will suggest using DMT to solve a problem and the person says, “We don’t have DMT licensed.” It usually takes me a while to get over the shock. Well, shock is a strong word. Dismay, disbelief, incredulity, maybe.
Epicor’s Data Management Tool is just too handy an appliance for a customer not to have. Sure, there are ways to get data into the ERP system without it.
First, there’s the manual way: put your fingers on the keyboard and get cracking. Your great-great-grandchildren will be colonizing Alpha Ceti 6 before you get done. Paste insert/paste update is a good way to get certain lists entered, especially for setup tables. Units of measure, FOB, AR Terms, etc. are good uses for this handy functionality.
But for crunching in the big stuff like customers, vendors, parts, and manufacturing methods, where the record counts grow, you must have it. Consider that a typical manufacturer might have 10,000 – 20,000 parts, 25,000 operations and 100,000 bill of material records. This data management software makes this possible in a reasonable time frame. And it handles the complexity so you don’t have to.
Here’s an example. When you enter the bill of operations, it’s one Excel sheet. Epicor ERP’s Data Management Tool in the Epicor 10 upgrade sets up the main record, plus all the default resources, etc. in several tables. You don’t have to worry about it.
DMT interfaces with Epicor’s “business objects” to make sure your data follows the rules.
Try to enter a BOM record without its related operation? No can do. Operation without a part revision? Customer with no sales person set up? Uh-uh. The data has to go in its natural order, just as if you were manually typing away. DMT respects the logic of the Epicor business objects.
With direct SQL updates (just say no), you can unintentionally corrupt your database. While you can add or delete records you don’t mean to (it’s a powerful tool, after all), it’s really hard to damage your database with DMT.
Some folks use the DMT as a part of their daily business processing. You can load transactions up in an Excel file, and away you go. It has great utility “utility,” too. I’ve seen a bad inventory part record where you couldn’t open it in Part Maintenance. Just load it into DMT and update something, the part description maybe. It doesn’t even have to change. Boop! Problem fixed.
Not sure you need DMT? Think it’s too difficult to master? Give us a shout. We’ll walk you through its benefits and operation.
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Author Bio:
Joe Trent is a Senior Consultant with The Estes Group. He has over 35 years of experience in manufacturing and distribution systems, in software development, implementation and use.
Digital transformation is a term that has received a lot of air time lately, and not surprisingly, it has also received a fair amount of suspicion. This should not be surprising, from the dawn of the written word, people have been suspicious of change.
In the Roman era, Ovid’s metamorphoses cataloged various characters of ancient myth, characters who, for one reason or another, were transformed by circumstance: The changing of a young man into a deer, for instance, or the turning of a young woman into a tree.
An in Ovid’s work, the transformation invariably was from a higher form to a lower form—radical change, for Ovid was essentially a bad thing. I wouldn’t mind being a tree, for instance, at least until the nearest roman tree surgeon came lumbering by.
In the 20th century Kafka’s own metamorphosis chronicled a similar transformation—this time, of one individual from an everyday man to a monstrous hideous beetle. One day you’re squelching the bugs underfoot, and the next day you’re the squelch! I see now why Kafka had such a hard time finding dates on Saturday evenings.
In this way, writers and thinkers over the years have been suspicious of change. Such types are often in search of the timeless, the eternal, the constant, and transformation has no place to stand among these pillars of persistence. It should also be noted too that Socrates was a lousy businessman. Just ask Asclepius about the rooster he had coming to him.
Now business rarely fit neatly into a literary narrative—businesses can be rough, and jumbled, sometimes tedious, sometimes unpredictable. But what businesses understand is that they cannot afford the stability and stasis that our literati longed for. Stasis just does keep the lights on for long
I met once with a small company in the mist of expanding its operations and they said to me that they were trying to move from being a big-little company to a little big company. That they had to change the way they did business, in order to sale up its operations and grow, and was making adjustments to its ERP system configuration to support these changes.
Another company I met was in the middle of a rocky new ERP system implementation, as it worked to replace the decades of paper-based processes that just didn’t work in the digital age. The processes and procedures that they had developed just no longer could support the work they needed to do. Their world had changed—their suppliers, their customers, and they knew that they needed to undergo a similar conversion.
For these companies, ERP digital transformation isn’t a literary reflection—it’s a simple necessity. What they’ve been doing up until now just cant support what they need to do, in order to hold onto what they have, or reach out for new opportunities. And our work at the Estes group was to support their reinventions utilizing the new ERP system implementation and the fine-tuning of their enterprise systems as the catalysts.
At the Estes group, we realize that the necessity of change comes with technical and organizational challenges, and we work with our clients to blend different approaches to ERP digital transformation in order to help our clients reshape themselves to better compete with an ever changing landscape.
A new ERP system implementation or changing your application architecture, surprisingly, is a lot like a caterpillar sewing itself up in a cocoon. There is a period of quiet but intense effort, and then the hope is that what emerges out of this effort is a butterfly, an not just another beetle.
I’m Brad Feakes, with the Estes Group and I look forward to talking with you.
Epicor’s Product Configurator is among its most enigmatic and elusive modules. Configurator has been diversely characterized and mischaracterized, as everything from the cure to all that ails you to the straw that broke the company’s back. This presents a daunting task for Epicor customers operating in engineer-to-order and configure-to-order environments, for there are a lot of answers and partial-answers out there, and getting to an answer specific to a given business is more easily said than done. Different companies, in different markets, have specific questions, and Epicor’s introductory materials tend to serve a general audience. Moreover, the experiences of customers from different industries and earlier versions of configurator may or may not apply to a company looking to implement or upgrade to the current Epicor release. The place of the customer within the Epicor implementation lifecycle also greatly affects their needs. For companies implementing Epicor for the first time in version 10.1, the questions may relate to the applicability of Epicor’s Product Configurator module to the company’s product offerings, or to the ease with which Product Configurator instances can be constructed and maintained. For companies moving from Vantage 8.03 or Epicor 9.05 versions, the questions may relate to the ease with which they can convert their configurators from Epicor’s older architecture to its new platform, and how to get their staff ready to maintain them, moving forward. Customers already in the heart of an implementation effort may just need someone to look over their shoulder and ensure that best practices are being followed, or even help expedite the configurator design and development.
For these reasons, The Estes Group tailors its Epicor ERP implementation services to meet the specific needs and circumstances of the client in question:
Configurator Upgrade Assessment: For existing Epicor customers considering the move from Vantage 803 or Epicor 905, but are concerned about the ramifications to their existing configurators, an assessment of their current use of Epicor’s Product Configurator module is often of great value. Estes’s consultants have configurator experience going back to Vantage 803 and moving forward into its current 10.1.600 release. Moreover, Estes’ consultants have experience uplifting and rebuilding configurators from earlier versions to Epicor’s current architecture, capturing the business requirements from the original versions, while leveraging Epicor’s new features, such as the expanded user interface, the elaborated method rule architecture its user-defined method capabilities and its highly-flexible configurator lookup table competencies. Such an assessment is most often a combination of remote and onsite effort, analyzing the existing solution and mapping its requirements to the Epicor 10 configurator.
Epicor ERP Configurator Business Process Review:
New or existing customers often benefit from the traditional business process review (BPR) format, tailored to the areas affecting or affected by Epicor’s Configurator (quoting, order entry, planning, manufacturing). The goal of a Configurator BPR is to help the client understand whether Epicor’s Product Configurator module will address their business needs. It is common to incorporate a Business Process Review at the onset of an upgrade assessment when working with existing Epicor customers. These events normally extend from a few days to a week in duration, depending primarily on the size and complexity of the business and follow a detailed agenda, designed to explore the customer’s products and processes from multiple angles.
Epicor ERP Configurator Proof-Of-Concept:
For new customers in greater need of verification, or for customers looking to get a jump-start to their implementation, a Proof-Of-Concept activity (POC) is often the appropriate direction. Normally performed on the heels of a BPR, POC events involve a configurator and a production consultant working with the client team to develop a working prototype that can be processed through the quote-to-ship cycle, for purposes of business process prototyping and configurator verification. For companies in need of a definitive answer to specific questions, a Proof-Of-Concept activity is the most concrete way in which to provide them. And for companies struggling to gain project momentum, these events can be highly beneficial in gaining much-needed project traction.
Configurator Development Support: For customers in the midst of an Epicor implementation, but in need of some “extra muscle” in the area of Product Configurator, Estes offers trained consultants who can step in, roll up their sleeves, and immediately assist with design review, configurator development, and related system consulting. These activities can be performed remotely or onsite, based on customer need, and can vary in scope from a few remote hours a week, to an onsite intensive session, to ongoing engagement.
Ask us any question you have about Epicor ERP Configurator. We have answers.
Many IT departments are multifaceted, and they don’t have the time to properly take care of everything, including planning for the future of technology. Virtual CIO services allow you to extend your IT leadership for additional executive guidance when needed.
For example, many customers feel their ERP system is upgraded simply by adding big hardware. However, IT is actually an investment, not an expense, and includes resources that extend far beyond the initial technology purchases. To help companies with the investment of IT, whether in hardware or in software, our IT experts start with infrastructure planning, virtualization advice, virtualization tuning, and security assessments. We need to look at the security of your system overall and by application. We need to evaluate your IT process and develop maintenance planning strategies because all machines and software require some maintenance.
All databases require management on a weekly, if not daily, basis.
Our IT services team can help you with database management. In addition, we can set up a schedule so that it’s ongoing for you. We can even be a remote person when you need external expertise.
Everyone talks about disaster recovery, yet very few people ever implement it. It has to be done. Look at it as a matter of when disaster’s going to strike, not if. What is a good business continuity plan? How’s the business going to run after you’re down? We need to talk about these items. Do you need security for virtual office workers? We can and will be your customer advocate. If you have issues with anything involving your IT, we can help you work your way through this and plan it.
What has been slowing your business down? We know technology should not, and we will ensure it will not again.
Ben Nixon, Vice President of the Enterprise Technology with the EstesGroup.
I am here today to speak to you a few moments on IT performance testing and tuning.
You know, everyone wants your IP system to operate efficiently. I’ve got 17 years of Epicor experience, and this service can help you identify and eliminate as many hardware and configuration bottlenecks as possible.
Are these negatively affecting your assisted performance?
Have you ever thought about the cost of downtime?
These are items we could help you with. You know, a little time spent now can make your operation much more efficient.
Have you ever looked at the cost of downtime? How much does a down man-hour cost? Many people do not look at these items. Take a look at that. It doesn’t take long to realize we can make things much more efficient. We can come in, and we can help you test your servers, tune them, set up maintenance plans, identify bottlenecks, review your resources to see if they’re configured properly. We run the Epicor performance diagnostics tools to see if your application is performance and Epicor’s quality assurance performance benchmarks.
How much does a down man-hour cost? Many people do not look at these items. Take a look at that. It doesn’t take long to realize we can make things much more efficient. We can come in, and we can help you test your servers, tune them, set up maintenance plans, identify bottlenecks, review your resources to see if they’re configured properly. We run the Epicor performance diagnostics tools to see if your application is performance and Epicor’s quality assurance performance benchmarks.
Many people do not look at these items. Let’s take a look at these issues in your business. It doesn’t take long to realize we can make things much more efficient. We can come in, and we can help you test your servers, tune them, set up maintenance plans, identify bottlenecks, review your resources to see if they’re configured properly. We run the Epicor performance diagnostics tools to see if your application is performance and Epicor’s quality assurance performance benchmarks.
Is your SQL maintenance plan very much forgotten?
Everyone thinks SQL’s plug and play, do you? It is not.
SQL’s a great database. It needs some maintenance. We can help you do that. We can and will review your virtual configuration. It often — one little setting can make a difference. Upon completion, we give you a detailed report of what you’re gonna need. Uh, more satisfied users. User complaints come to a slowdown. These are all items that will help you, um, enabling your employees to do their jobs faster, providing better customer service, quicker diagnostics.
And the nice part is, I love to work with your people, your-your IT people. We’ll train them. We’ll show them what to look for, how to help keep this going. Give me a call for a free 30-minute consultation. Let’s see what Estes can do for you. Make your business run better with our Epicor training.
Tell us how we can help, what has been slowing your business down? We know technology should not, and we will ensure it will not again.
Ben Nixon, Vice President of the Enterprise Technology with the EstesGroup.
Here is what you need to know before you upgrade your Epicor ERP database.
I’m going talk to you a few moments about upgrading your Epicor database. You know, everyone wants to upgrade. You’ve got many people coming to you, telling you they can help you upgrade. Give Estes a call. We can help you. You have many considerations. This is not as simple as, “Push a button, and you’re upgraded.” This is not as simple as, “Put it in. No testing, no training, and walk away.” Let Estes help make your move efficient and safe.
Give EstesGroup a call at1-888-300-2340 to help you implement a safe database Epicor ERP Upgrade.
We can help you. There are many things to consider before you upgrade. This is not as simple as, “Push a button, and you’re upgraded.” This is not as simple as, “Put it in. No testing, no training, and walk away.” Let EstesGroup help make your move efficient and safe.
Upgrades fail for a variety of reasons; Lack of planning, Lack of testing. Failure to recognize changes required, No verification of data. Too often I see a customer upgrade and then before frustrated for a variety of the previous reasons. What is the impact on your business if the Epicor system is not functional or performing as it should?
You are moving forward with technology, let Estes help you embrace it and before more efficient.
Don’t take your business down. We can help you consider: Now is the time to possibly reimplement. Is now the time to virtualize? Is your hardware out of date? You know, Microsoft Server 2000 went out of date in July of 2015. If you’re still running on that, you’re walking in a danger zone. Let us help you decide if an upgrade is right and how to do it.
We have many choices for you.
We can help you, guide you as far as any services you need for ERP software training and consulting. Give usa call for a free 30-minute consultation. Thank you.
