So I got my favorite response from support again, (where’s the sarcasm font?) of “We can connect you with a consultant” for something that should have been a quick 5 minute explanation but they couldn’t/wouldn’t explain to me.
My question is for the consultants out there, do you have extra resources (help and documentation etc.) that is available to you that isn’t available to the general user? My experience with consultants so far (and it is admittedly limited) is that they are pretty much doing what I am doing which is clicking around to figure out how the system works (don’t get me wrong, that skill is actually quite rare and worth paying for sometimes). Years of experience obviously is something that gives them a leg up, but for new features, what extra resources do they have to understand them?
The reality is, I have been given no budget to hire a consultant, and if I did want to make the case to do so, I don’t know what they have access to do that we don’t as customers in using as built features (obviously custom stuff is different, coding is a different skill set). I’m genuinely curious.
I apologize if this post comes off as Epicor bashing or consultant bashing. That is not my intent, I’m just trying to figure out the business.
Brandon,
For the most part I would say you are correct, documentation wise we get our resources from Epicor, and experimentation trumps documentation. But in addition there is field experience, working with many different Epicor customers with different business processes and requirements.
Depending on the question sometimes they can provide a good answer and sometimes they can’t.
In my experience, if you use any language that seeks for ‘advice’ such as ‘so how should this be set?’
‘What is the recommended use?’ etc. they will recommend a consultant. Probably a liability thing.
That being said, I have had long arguments with Support regarding how the documentation says it should work (which is what i wanted) and how it is actually working, and instead of agreeing and pushing hard on Development, they just report it to development and they come back with ‘working as designed’ which by the way is not the same as ‘working as documented.’ I would not be surprised if internally Dev & Doc departments fight all the time.
However, this is where I would think E10Help would be well… very helpful, as there are many consultants here.
Hi Brandon,
As Epicor Certified Partners we do get a little bit more information than the average bear from Epicor, but frankly most good consultants just have a lot of experience and have been doing this for a long time, so they probably have seen your particular issues before. As certified consultants we do get tested by epicor on our knowledge of the software, we are required to go through the epicor education process and on every release we are required to re-study / re-certify.
We don’t know everything and certainly sometimes we “click around” to figure things out, but hopefully that’s only done on the rare instance where the consultant doesn’t already know what the solution is. Also a mistake that some people and make is to assume that just because someone is a “consultant” they know every area of the system. That’s a pretty big mistake, most consultants that are any good, are only good at very specific areas of the system (Finance, CRM, Inventory, Technical) sure we they have “broad” knowledge across the system in general but everyone has their specialty.
For example, I am a technical consultant, I can customize, integrate, install and modify Epicor 10 and it’s affiliated software… 5 ways from Sunday, but don’t ask me about GL’s or finance… that’s someone else’s department .That’s why it is good to know before you engage someone what their strengths are, and if the area you need help with isn’t something they are strong in, hopefully they have other members of their team which do have strong knowledge in that area that can help.
Don’t ever engage a consultant that claims to know everything… they are lying to you and you will waste your money. When you are a hammer everything looks like a nail, and so they will play to their strengths. In my view it is perfectly acceptable and encouraged to ask a consultant which areas of the system he/she is most familiar with.
Many times a project will touch various areas of the system and that’s where a team can come very handy.
Epicor support can give you answers about the software but any custom solution (Customization, BPM etc) is CSG Territory and they won’t / want touch it so all they can do is send you the “right” people. Obviously not everyone has a budget for a consultant or CSG, that’s where a community like this comes in handy. Ask your question here and we will do the best to answer it.
Hope this helps a little… and no… there is no magical book of Epicor that we consultants have… TRUST ME! I’ve looked for it for years!
Thanks for the replies. I do value the forum greatly, and prefer to come here first for pretty much all of my questions, because I get better information here than I do anywhere else, and the ability to read all of the posts going through here have increased my knowledge tenfold just learning the existence of tools to use and things to watch for in general.
Good responses up here and you are correct about the liability. Our support staff is not trained as devs, don’t have peer review access, security and performance impact awareness… the list goes on. If they did, your maintenance bill would quadruple. That’s physics and the same with any technology out there. If another company tells you otherwise, they are lying.
I concur with @josecgomez. Not only is the product wide and feature rich, so is the technology world today. Ask for an expert in Cloud? AWS, Azure and GCP are all radically different. It’s a specialist world these days.
Take a look at the growth of StackOverflow or Wikipedia as evidence. Top ten site on the planet for traffic - why? Because every tech company and open source project out there can not keep up with the variety of questions coming from every angle. Develop community is critical to a product or platform. You cannot get your information from a single source anymore. If we had a ‘DevHelp.Epicor.com’ out there, I’d hang out to encourage that community. I don’t so I take my coffee breaks and after dinner ‘lazyboy and laptop’ moments up here to learn and to encourage others to help.
Crowd based knowledge is how you move from the novice to master.
The thing is, when I get the “consultant” recommendation, I am not talking about DEV stuff. I know not to call support for anything custom for that reason. I’m not asking for C# help, or even BPM help. I only call for base use bugs (in my opinion bugs). Then I get “working as designed” with no business case explanation, and “call a consultant, bye”. I write out very detailed business cases of what we do and why it doesn’t make sense that it is programmed the way it is, doesn’t matter. I get no explanation of why it’s supposed to work as programmed, just an SCR number to a record that I can’t access as a customer. I’ve even talked to distraught service personnel that apologize but tell me that even though they agree with me, there’s no way they can win and argument with dev, so they won’t even try.
This isn’t all case for sure, there has been many times when they have come through and really helped me out (I missed a check box or something I didn’t know about), but this has happened three or four times to me now and it is quite frustrating.
That’s why I was asking if consultants had some resources that customers didn’t, or if they were using the same help and technical documentation as I am, just coupled with more varied experience.
Ok sorry, rant over. I don’t want to get anyone riled up, just trying to figure out where to go from here.
If you open a ticket there’s a chance you’ll get a survey. Negative surveys seem to get some attention. I couldn’t get Crystal Reports developer to run, (other program busy), so I opened a ticket. I was told they don’t support 3rd party software. Stuff like that pisses me off, because I think we pay more than enough maintenance on a pretty much dead product (E9) and it’s not like I open a lot of tickets. I’m not seeing a discount on my annual maintenance.
I am not riled up and appreciate the feedback. I have isolated interactions with Support Management so it’s always interesting to gauge customer reactions. I ran an 800 hotline back in the day before going back to school and reemerging in dev so have an extreme appreciation for the efforts, the role in a business, the challenges.
Sitting in the dev group most of my life I have never really seen the biz side of customer customizations handled well. It’s always a struggle with the ‘art’ or ‘personality’ of a customers use of a software package. It takes someone that knows the BUSINESS side and the abilities of the software to connect the dots and give options and recommendations. If the support rep did give you an answer with even an hour of discussion on the phone, I’d be suspect about the answer. Of course, this is all speculation relative to the issue and experience you had. You lived it and know the specifics so I cannot judge. I do know that the rep(s) have a boss. I know you have a CAM. I know most of our execs are accessible in one way or another and I know we get harassed about Customer satisfaction all the time so you do have options. I hate quietly irritated customers, don’t be one.
There are many of us in here fighting the good fight. It’s a challenge whether dealing with us or driving on a road and dealing with someone not letting you in while merging or trying to navigate a grocery store aisle and the person is looking aimlessly into space with their cart in the middle of the row. People can get wrapped up in their own day and not be on the look out for others. Not sure if this is the case or not for you today but obviously happens. Consider this me waving you to merge into the lane
Brandon,
As broad as Epicor is, there are many ways to do certain processes. There are some areas that setup wrong will work fine in one area, but affect another area negatively.
When you are working with consultants, you want consultants that have experience with Epicor but also have real-world experience. This is something that you can’t find in the documentation, you need to live it.
Working with someone that has both of these experiences, will help accelerate your process improvements with Epicor. This forum is a good source of people that can help you. I have met many very smart users out there that have done the testing.
Jose made some good points - the certification process - going through 60 Plus courses and test is not simple.
As far as extra resources - I have built out solutions, end-user procedures, dashboards, etc. to help in my practice. When I work with customers I pull out these tools to help solve the problems that the customer is having. This is true of many of the good consultants and partners that I have worked with.
If you are looking to bring in a consultant, talk with the consultant ask for references, find out if their experience matches with what your company does.
Also, don’t feel that you have to keep a consultant on site, they are just like any other professional service provider - if things are working find another consultant.
Another approach is to put your question out to this forum, users and consultant want to help you. They may have just the right information that you need to solve your issue.
Someday - you will be able to give back to this group to.
We pay for technical support, basic application support, and perpetual upgrades. If you’re paying maintenance and staying on E9 that’s your problem not Epicor’s.
I’ve gone through the creation of those kinds of things before. It’s a heck of a business exercise. How do you fund the setup and maintenance, what’s liability and commitment, etc. It’s all doable but a heck of a connect the dots exercise. In the meanwhile, a lot of people of just appreciating the efforts here so lurk.
Definitely do appreciate how open and approachable you are, both here and at Insights. As a guy working at a small company, not often that I get the kind of response from devs of bigger software shops.
It’s always a balance to show a bit of forward looking but not guarantee delivery on … well anything. I think this audience understands that as it has a strong dev participation and we all know the realities in IT. Even with everything moving to the cloud, the IT backlog never seems to get finished
We went live in late June 2017 on Epicor 10.1.500 after an 18 month implementation project. Our experience was, the further we got from ‘out of the box’ functionality the less useful the consultants were. We spent significant time modeling scenarios which the consultants had never seen. This is not their fault. They constantly deal with people taking the basic baby steps and do not have to go deep into Epicor on a daily basis. In my opinion, the strength of a consultant is their ability to comprehend the business cases we were putting in front of them. If they could come up with a few ways to deal with these complex high tech cases they were useful to us. The first Ops consultant wasn’t very strong so we told Epicor we wanted a stronger one. They found a heavy hitter and we were back on track again. We had two financial consultants who were both strong on GL configuration, AP and AR but when it came to costing in manufacturing they had no idea how that worked. Consultants are great for pushing you out of the nest.
As for additional resources, the Epicor consultants had a message board which they reached out to pretty often. They would say they were going to reach out their colleagues for an answer but as far as I’m aware only one of those requests paid off. I heard from an ex-developer who worked at a channel partner that they have an awesome tool with canned code for customization work.
.That’s why it is good to know before you engage someone what their strengths are, and if the area you need help with isn’t something they are strong in, hopefully they have other members of their team which do have strong knowledge in that area that can help.
