Hey, folks. It’s Matt Thompson here with a real quick video for you all. I’m just going to show you some tips and tricks in Epicor 10—how to get around. There are a couple key features here that a lot of folks don’t know about. I just want to be able to make sure everybody kind of has an idea.
I’ve pulled open a real quick dashboard tracker here that’s showing our year-to-date sales. It’s got some nice buckets. It goes all the way across the screen here with a lot of information. So, I want to show you some things.
A lot of folks want to be able to take this out to Microsoft Excel and be able to massage that. Well, anywhere you see this grid view it’s no problem. You can right-click, copy to Excel. Then it’s going to open up Excel and dump everything in there for you and you can be on your way.
A lot of folks want to be able to see and massage the data a little bit. They can still do that. So I can right-click and say show group by. Now I can bring my cust. ID up here. I’m showing where I’ve got my customers grouped into these nice neat buckets. I’ve got that information now dissected so I can look at things a little bit more clearly. In addition I can right-click here and say show me my filters. I’m going to filter this down to only show and say Boeing. Now I’ve got only the Boeing Company’s information that’s actually here in front of me.
That’s all fine and dandy. Those things are great for filtration and everything. Now let’s say I still want to massage it in Excel. If I right-click copy to Excel, it’s actually going to fire this thing up. I can see that it brings it over, and it still has my group-bys automatically brought over into Excel. Then I can expand and see my data column sets. That’s really cool and a really neat function here with Epicor 10.
In addition to this, I got a lot of information rolling out to the right. Maybe I want to be able to lock my screen or freeze panes. This is a little hidden gem that a lot of folks don’t know about. Anytime I see this scroll window in a grid view whether it’s horizontal or vertical, on the capstone here, I see this little rectangle. When I roll my mouse over it, my cursor changes. I can click and drag that guy right over to where I want that to freeze. It essentially just made a mere copy on both sides of the same dashboard data.
Now as I scroll, I have the effect of freeze panes right here in my window. I can actually scroll across, see my year-to-date totals while still keeping my name in check here without having to change and manipulate where I’m dragging and dropping different columns. It’s a really nice feature there to be able to see very quickly how your data looks, feels, forms and everything else.
Then in addition, the one last one here, you can show summaries. That will give you the ability to do summarized totals here within the different column sets. You can actually see some aggregate sums out there as well. I hope this is definitely helpful for you. There are some tips and tricks that a lot of folks just don’t know about. Make sure to start a conversation with us—estesgrp.com/ask-an-expert.
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Hey, gang. Welcome to Project Roles and Responsibilities, the Cliff Notes Version. We’re going to get started here and just kind of run you guys through hopefully in three minutes or less some of the key roles and responsibilities you need on your ERP successful project.
Number one, you need an executive from the client side to be able to understand your business goals and be able to support and establish whatever that project, plan, scope and any resources that need to happen on that side to ensure that you have that good success.
Your client side project manager as well needs to be able to understand the methodology, your goals and objectives that you need, who are the key people on your project team and being able to help motivate and help move things along so that that project thing gets executed and you stay on time, on task and on budget.
Your Estes Group consulting team, they need to be able to follow what that scope is that you have, be able to execute to those assigned tasks, but most of all, they’re there to teach you the software. They’re there to be able to figure out your business problems and be able to solve those problems with ERP solutions in the form of end user procedures at the end of the day.
That way you can map over all of those new processes into your new software package as cleanly and successfully as possible with the understanding that your team of consultants is going to provide you with the best possible solution with the least amount of inefficiencies as possible at this point in time.
So your customer side, what is all about you guys here and what should be expected of you, right? So customer executive sponsor, person needs to be well informed. They need to be the one that’s setting the ultimate goals and objectives. Odds are they’re the ones that are pulling the trigger at the end of the day saying here’s the reasons why we’re going to a new ERP software or we’re upgrading our ERP software.
Yes, it’s going to be painful. We understand that, but here are the reasons why. Here’s the scope in which we need to do that. Okay, team, you’ve got the ball. Go and run with it. Let me know what you need. I’m here to make it happen, and they’re there to celebrate when you do make it happen.
Your steering committee, made up of all the business leaders that are most likely responsible fiscally for each of the different functional areas of your business. That may be by product line. That may be by functional area. There’s several different dividing lines that we’ve seen businesses divide those up by, but the key there is, is your steering committee is going to make sure that any conflict or any different decisions that need to happen come up to them, they’re able to help resolve those issues, whether it be resources, whether it be scope, whether it be just process decision, and be able to help things move along their way.
Your customer project manager, this person is there to basically be a task master. They’re going to be tied to the estes group PM. They’re going to be following that methodology and they’re making sure that everybody does their homework, it’s on task and it’s with the right amount of time that needs to be dedicated to it to ensure that we’ve got quality and success that’s going to come out of that. They’re also there to be able to report up to the steering committee anything that needs to happen and go from there.
Now the majority of the folks are right here in the customer core team. So that core team is made up of your unit managers that have to build and decide on all those processes that need to be mapped in. They’re working directly with the consultants, with the problems, with the puzzles, helping resolve those, document it, and ultimately train the end users at the end of the day.
So, folks, I know that was the Cliff Notes version, very quick. There’s a longer video out there that goes into a lot more explanation. Feel free to take a look at it. This one was just designed to be a real quick teaser to give you a guys an understanding of what kind of roles and responsibilities we see and how we see that they’re important.
So feel free. Start a conversation with us, estesgroup.com/askanexpert, [email protected] via email, Facebook and Twitter, Linked In, all the social media, make sure you get in touch with us out there. You’ll see any of the new stuff that’s coming up. Facebook.com/estesgroup is where our page is at. Hit us up at estesgroup on Twitter, amd LinkedIn.com/company/estestgroup and you’ll find our business page out there on LinkedIn.
Thanks, guys, very much for your time. Looking forward to hearing from you in that conversation.
Want to learn more about Roles and Responsibilities in ERP?
Hey, everybody, Matt Thompson here with the Estes Group and going to run you through just the Cliff Notes version of what peak methodology is, how we approach it and why it’s good for projects.
So what is our approach to Peak Methodology?
It’s made up of really a best practice model that consists of three different things, number one being our methodology itself which is a five-stage methodology made up of prepare, educate, architect, validate and stabilize. It’s a hybrid methodology that brings in some traditional waterfall, breaks into some agile methodologies where we sprint things out and then we go back into that traditional waterfall for the validate and stabilize.
We also incorporate that in with a lot of fact finding and understanding that rolls into your statement of work, and we couple all of that experience that comes at you from not only years of experiences of our own folks and our own team and Estes Group itself, but also thousands and thousands of projects that are backed by Epicore and our certification that we have with them.
So how do we break that down?
Prepare, we want to establish that project scope. We want to really get the understanding of our schedule and resources on both internal and external, and all of that comes out and culminates through the project plan development. We use an online project planning tool so that you have full visibility to that any time, real time, all the time.
All of that comes out through our best practice reviews. So what we do is we engage with you guys, we come out, we take a really good look at the business, we go through some in-depth workshops and we come out of that understanding what the scope of the project needs to be, what are the key processes, the Achilles’ heels that we are going to see for your business, for your project, because every single one is different, so we attack it in that way.
Then we go into education. Key thing here, core module education. We’re level setting vocabulary. Consultants tend to speak Klingon and clients tend to have their very own language that they’d developed over the years, so we need to level set that so that we can have good, beneficial, architectural conversations coming up.
So here’s where we then break in and we do the architecture prototyping of your project, and this is where we take that spin and we go into agile. So we break that down towards nice and neat monthly springs. So every month you go through the exact same processes as you did the month prior, so you know you’re going to be launching a spring. You’re going to be working through data migration for the activities within that sprint, and you’re going to be finalizing processes by the end of the month for that sprint, and anything else that shakes out of that is coming out into a development track on the side, might need customization, custom reports, dashboards, those kinds of things, right?
So the idea here is though is it creates consistency, repeatability and a really clear understanding of exactly how you’re going to take all of those bites out of that whale of an ERP project. We document all of those results through workflow in the EUPs, so if you use Exall and EKM, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about there for those tools. Otherwise, we have some other tools available through different Excel templates called biostream scripts and those kinds of things and those kinds of things and then EUP templates to make sure you’re documenting every last procedure. Click here, save here, do what you need to do there and then go. Key is you’re go live ready at the end of this stage.
So then we break that down and we go into validate. We want to make sure that you’re doing a full dress rehearsal here. That includes a cutover process. That’s different than a lot of other folks in how they approach it out there, so make sure you understand how you’re going to prove that you are ready for go live and proving it is the most important step, because if you don’t and you try to just go live, never seen one of those be successful, right? So make sure you go through… you do the dress rehearsal, you know what’s going to happen and then odds are for go live day, you’re going to be really prepared for what might happen.
So when you do all that it just goes right into stabilizing. So it should be a very natural cutover and transition at that stage of the game. You have final training that needs to be caught up. You go live. You stabilize the system where we’re monitoring, we’re helping, any of the little things that pop up here and there, we’re helping troubleshoot and triage, but very typically at this stage of the game it gets to be pretty light.
So Estes Group is tailing off drastically at this stage of the game. You guys are ramping up, and you’re starting to see that ROI because money is not going out the door; you’re using the system now for good information on what you’re doing.
So with that, start a conversation with us. Love to hear from you. Love to hear what your thoughts are on the methodology and what you just saw here today. There is a longer version of this out there so if you want to hear in more detail and more of what my thoughts are on the project methodology, by all means take a look at that video, go on to our YouTube channel and you’ll be able to find that.
You’ll also find it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and start conversations with us. You can hit us up on any of those three at any point in time. I pretty well monitor them real time and as well hit us on our website. Ask an expert comes directly into my inbox. I’ll be glad to talk you with you about any of your questions you may have and then as well [email protected] is monitored by several of us here, and any one of us will be happy to get back to you as quick as we can. Thank you guys very much. Looking forward to the next one.
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No Hurt Feelings: Getting Over Getting Actively Refused in the Epicor System
“When you were called, did you answer or did you not? Perhaps softly and in a whisper?”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Kierkegaard, the nineteenth century existential thinker, wrote at length of the internal struggle between the individual agent and his or her sense of existence. His philosophical work Fear and Trembling outlines the moral anxiety produced by choosing to live according to an absolute faith, in a world that provides no validation or verification. This has been commonly referred to as a leap of faith.
The Epicor System Doesn’t Hate You
With its logical foundations in propositional calculus and its physical manifestation in Silicon, one might not expect such angst to enter the realm of information technology. Nevertheless, anxieties flare more often than one might expect when implementing software such as ERP. For example, when I worked for an Epicor customer, users encountered the following login error with trepidation:
I never expected logging into the Epicor system to require a leap of faith, yet users found the message especially troublesome, and came to me in desperation, pleading that I restore their confidence in the application. The mere thought of being “actively refused” by the application server struck many new users as a surprising, almost personal, affront. “What did I do wrong?” they would anxiously ask me, “Did I make it mad?”
The error is really quite easy to explain and resolve without things getting personal. The system normally raises this error when the application server gets stopped, hung up or is otherwise unresponsive. It’s an error due to inactivity rather than activity. There is no angry ghost in the target machine, more of a sleepy doorman. System administrators normally resolve such a circumstance by simply restarting the AppServer. Once restarted, the AppServer can nowactively respond to login requests.
Moving On From Lost Connections
Have you ever felt actively refused? Do you fear the temporary loss of connection to the information you need? Has your AppServer ever made you tremble? Well, fear no more—the next time you receive this error when logging into the system, remind your system administrator of your existence with an email that includes the error message. And keep the faith.
Learn more Epicor consulting strategies that can improve your business:
Not Ready to Give Up you Crystal Reports in the Latest Version of Epicor 10? It’s ok, you don’t have to just yet. The current release of Epicor 10.700 doesn’t make it easy to use your existing Crystal ODBC reports, however there is a process for get them to work.
The steps are as follows:
1. Create an ODBC user and password that has access to the SQL DB. Create the ODBC System DSN on the server and then the clients.
2. Epicor “accidentally” disabled the “use default user and password” from the report print screen. The good news is that Epicor has a simple SQL script that can be run to re-enable this. This functionality is key for not having to enter your user name and password or embed the credentials at the client or report level.
3. Now that the credentials are working you’ll need to do a little cleanup on your existing reports. You’ll need to point the existing report tables to the new Epicor 10 database tables. The key is to point any tables where there are UDF’s, to the newly created SQL views that were created instead of the actual table. Any tables not using UDF’s can be pointed directly to the corresponding ERP table.
4. You may also find that some formula cleanup is necessary if you are using a newer version of Crystal.
5. Lastly, make sure to point your reports to the new server location in Menu Maintenance. There you have it!
Now you can buy yourself a little time to get these reports converted to SSRS. Please contact Estes if you need assistance in getting your Crystal Reports to work OR if you would like to discuss options for converting your existing Crystal Reports to SSRS.
How many of these Epicor Storefront B2B ecommerce features does your site have that helps your business retain your most profitable customers?
We all know that it cost much more to obtain a new customer than it does to keep a customer, but that does not mean you can rest on your laurels when it comes to bringing continual value to your best customers. Here are the top ranked features that manufacturing and distribution customers have stated are very important for their vendors to have on their ecommerce sites that keep them coming back. 1. The site displays my contract pricing and products after I sign in.
2. I can see all of my orders and the status of my orders regardless if I create an order on the ecommerce site or if I call Customer Service and they place my order.
3. I can see exactly how much inventory my vendor has available for each product on the site which helps me manage timely delivery and know up front if any portion of my order may be back ordered.
4. My employees can request quotes on the site and not have to wait to do this during business hours of the vendor.
5. Shipment tracking is critical to our business as our field technicians need to know within a few hours of when the order will arrive at their job site.
6. Our vendor supplies us with fairly complex products and being able to have access to installation documents, how to videos, and other technical information has really been helpful to our employees in completing jobs faster – they just use their phone, login and view or download the documents they need right when they need them.
These top ranked features make sense, and what allows the information to be current and available to the customers that they have ranked in the top 6 is tight integration with your E9 or Epicor 10 system. In addition, Customer Service has more time to focus on higher value services to your customers by providing current self-service information on the ecommerce site that answers their questions. So where do you stand with these six features that are critical to retaining your best customers? If it is time to switch ecommerce platforms OR actually implement your first B2B ecommerce site maybe it is time to look at Epicor Storefront! You won’t be disappointed.
