Epicor Newbie looking for direction

Question

I am an Epicor and Crystal Reports Newbie. I have started working with these programs a month ago, when I was hired. I am still trying to figure out how you know whether you are trying to customize a BAQ, Dashboard, etc. How to know where/when to make a new BOM report and such. If anyone out there has some tips, I would greatly appreciate it. I feel slightly intimidated by the program but am also determined to learn my way through it. Thanks!

Answer 1

Toohey! Welcome to the world of Epicor! Although I'm sure in the past couple of months you have learned the ropes, here are some extra tips to keep you moving forward:

That is not part of the system functionality

In order to keep costs under control, err on the side of not making system customizations to meet all user requests. You will quickly see that adding a quick field as a customization to a form isn't just the 5 minute change it seems like. You will soon be creating several custom reports and dashboards to report off of this field, and the cost of the change soon outweighs the benefit in many situations. As you become more familiar with this, try to balance ROI against the high cost of Epicor system customizations. It is best to lead with "that is not part of the system functionality", and when they push the issue, treat even small changes as controlled projects.

BAQ and Report Changes

Inevitably, you will need to customize the system's BAQs and Reports to meet your business needs because the standard system isn't designed exactly for your business. Epicor has standard BAQs that start with 'z' and many reports. You should avoid editing the stock BAQs and reports, because they will be overwritten with each patch of Epicor. Instead, copy the standard distribution BAQs and rename the copies using your company initials as a prefix. Similarly, you want to create a custom reports folder separate (or within) the standard reports folder where you place all of your modified reports. You can then link the menu to the BAQ Report or Report Data Definition, and link the report style to the location of your new custom report on the server.

Customizations

Maintenance of customizations has a high long-term cost if you do not have in-house developers. A critical piece of advice here is to make sure all of the code, be it in C# or VB, is thoroughly commented. Even if you're generating code with a wizard, do yourself a favor and put a standard header into the script of every customization that includes the first date of the customization, when it was modified, and detail everything that was changed (especially if the change was a property change or a field addition that does not clearly appear in the script). Customizations have been known to fail for unexplained reasons, or create bad script that is not editable through the standard Epicor interface, and there may come a time when you have to rebuild the customization from scratch using only this change log and things you can clearly see in the form. You should save your customizations with some obvious standard naming convention (something like ORDER_ENTRY_CSR_YYMMDD), and make sure you update all menus to reflect the newest customization for the purpose you're using it. We also export our customizations for archival, just in case something should happen. Another note here is if you do not increment the customization name on a change and then update the menu items, users will still be use locally cached versions of the page until they clear their client cache. So, I always recommend incrementing. Another note on customizations and every custom exportable object in Epicor is to do yourself a favor and export them to either a source control system or a file repository so that after you deploy a faulty customization, rolling back to the previous version is quick and painless.

BPM Directives

As you're probably aware by now, BPM directives are powerful tools which can be used to update tables and prevent users from making terrible business decisions. A note on these is similar to customizations - comment comment comment!

Consultant Use

If you are using external consultants to create BPMs or Customizations, mandate distribution of commented source code that can be understood internally by one of your team members.

I hope this helps!

Source: 4 yrs experience as an Epicor ERP programmer

Answer 2

I would like to add that you should develop any Customization, BPM or Baq/Dashboard in the test system because any error on a solution can stop users from perform their job. Also, you can use a powerful tool called tracing options that helps you to recognize where to place the BPM directives. Further more there is a huge Epicor forum where you can post questions and a comunity of consultants , developers and users will answer your questions, and advise you about best Epicor practices, and it is completely free. You need to register on it; this is the link www.e10help.com.