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‘Epicor’ Category

Epicor Insights 2012 Recap Highlights

Friday, May 11th, 2012

Clients First Business Solutions Attends the 2012 Epicor Insights Customer and Partner Conference

Epicor Insights 2012 concluded Wednesday, May 9 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. This was the first joint conference with customers from both heritage Epicor and heritage Activant. It was announced there was over 4000 people in attendance. Overall the conference was a success. It was announced the next conference will also be a combined conference and will be in Nashville. At that point Epicor will decide to split the conference or keep it combined in the future. The statements below were announced at the conference.

1. Epicor ERP 9.05.700 GA announced.

  • Epicor said they put 50 man years into this release. Prior releases had around 13 man years.
  • Epicor ERP 9.05.700 is faster than prior releases. Epicor understands the product still needs to be faster. This will be a goal of future releases. New standards have been implemented that in the future software will not be release that is slower than the current version.
  • Epicor ERP 9.05.700 is much more stable than prior releases. Epicor understand the product still needs to be better. This will be a goal of future releases. New standards have been implemented that in the future software will not be released with any known problems.
  • Six customers have already implemented Epicor 9.05.700 and in interviews are very happy with the 700 release.
  • New Replenishment Workbench functionality designed to meet the needs of the supply chain and distribution.
  • The ability to support co-products and bi-products when completing a job and properly handling costing.  This is important for a variety of industries.  For example, if you are stamping metal from a mold and get a left and a right side part, the 2 co-products can properly be accounted for.

2. Future Epicor ICE 3.0 will support the Microsoft Window Azure and SQL Azure.

The Azure platform offers the following benefits:

  • Open and flexible cloud platform
  • Applications can be built quickly
  • Applications can be delivered virtually any place on any device.
  • Applications can be scaled to any capacity.  Microsoft has built some of the largest data centers on earth.  Rivaling even Google’s centers.
  • The Epicor ICE platform will be integrated to some of the other Epicor products

3. Epicor Social is nearing release

Epicor will soon be releasing a new module that will eventually be available for most of their products with initial release targeted at the Flagship Epicor 9 solution.  We are huge proponents of using Social concepts, like those you may be used to with Facebook, in a business environment.  We have been using solutions like Socialcast (www.socialcast.com) to build communities among VAR’s and partners.

Epicor is bringing this ability WITHIN the ERP system.  This means you can ‘follow’ a customer as a salesperson.  You then would see a Twitter like stream of activity that happens to that customer such as new orders placed, credit holds, shipments, CRM calls etc.  You then could comment on any of this, including referencing other employees and have collaborative conversations around the customer, a particular order, quote etc.  All avoiding the email mess we all see today where all the information is locked away in individual’s inboxes.

4. Epicor has implemented a Six-Sigma continuous improvement program.

  • Epicor has started a continuous improvement program to improve the company processes.

From our observations and talking with executive management, we feel that this is a new Epicor.  Epicor had always been a leader in the industry with the latest technology but had been lacking in product quality discipline and a strong productive corporate culture.  The new merged organizations is a place that strives to be a “Best Workplace” and they know that quality of the solution is critical to long term success.  The 700 release looks to prove this out very well and we know will be a welcome change to existing and prospective customers of Epicor 9 and beyond.

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Posted in Epicor, Epicor 9 | No Comments »

Epicor 9 –Setup Windows Active Directory Security on the Epicor Data/Reports/Username directories.

Friday, May 4th, 2012

How to make sure your underlying data directories are Secure in Epicor 9.

In Epicor 9, all XML files and reports are generated in each usernames directory. In the example below, there is only one username called epicor. You can see the XML’s and TXT files along with the dates created. Epicor uses a file naming standard that a person can easily figure out what report each file belongs to. For example-AP Invoice Edit List, AR Invoice, Journal Listing, Petty Cash report, SO Pick list and so on.

image

In an Epicor production system, every Epicor user will have a directory in this reports directory. Even if you did a perfect job locking down the Epicor Menu security, you have to secure these directories. When the CFO or payroll person prints, all the files are placed in the username directory. If you do not secure these directories then corporate financials or payroll information is available thru window explorer.

Also remember to secure these directories also when new employees are hired. When a person leaves the company, someone needs to review the contents and delete every file not needed. All files that need to be kept should be copied to another directory. Then delete the ex-employees directory from the reports directory.

If there is a need to keep special, weekly, monthly, or yearly reports for a long period, these reports need to be moved somewhere else on the server. Some companies have written windows Command routines to purge all files from these directories on a periodic basis.

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Posted in Epicor, Epicor 9 | No Comments »

Dashboard Tips

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

Let the User Select a Date Range

 

Question

In Epicor 9 6.05 I want to create a Dashboard that has a date range filter nominated by the user in the tracker view.
The grid view is to show the total sales quantity and value by part with one line per part.

When you create the dashboard add a tracker view.  Then, in the tracker view select fields you want to use on the dashboard, including the date field.

Set the date field to prompt and then instead of "equals" select "greater than or equal to".  This is the first half of the equation.

Now for the ending date constraint. Right click on the tracker view and select customize tracker view. Select the time/date editor field from the toolbox and add it next to your date field. In the customizations dialog box select "is tracker query control" = "true" and then select the same date field. On the top of the customize tool box select "dashboard prompt" = "true" and then use "less than or equal to"

The user can now select a date range and get the results they expect.  I know they may seem a little obtuse but it does the trick.

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Posted in Epicor, Epicor 9 | No Comments »

Salesperson Security in Epicor 9

Monday, April 23rd, 2012

Manage Salespeople in Epicor 9.05

How to keep Salespeople from only working with the information they need?

In Epicor 9 to Epicor 9.05 in addition to the standard Epicor security there is special security setup for Salespeople. Buyers and Salesperson setup is a fairly straight forward process. That is once you figure out the Salespersons are actually entered in Work Force Maintenance. I am not going into detail on all fields in Work Force Maintenance and if I skip a particular field, field help will explain the field.

If you don’t take the time to properly configure Salesperson Security, it is quite easy for your customer list to walk out the door when your salespeople do.

Work Force Maintenance:

Before entering Sales People into Epicor, a corporate decision needs to be made on how to use territories. How to use territories is a company by company decision. For example, some companies the territory is defined geographically, others by Product, others by Customer type. Once this decision is made, the next decision is which sales people are limited to a territory or can view all territories. Next is to decide which sale people can see the entire Company Sales Pipeline. This is normally restricted to Sales Management.  The Commissions fields are the next important fields to be decided upon.

 

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The other security feature that is special for a salesperson is defined on the Authorized User tab in Work Force Maintenance. This defines the other salespeople authorized to work on this salesperson quotes and SO’s in case of vacation or emergency. Even thought the current salesperson was defined on the Detail tab, the salesperson must be added as an authorized user for their own SO’s. The default buyer flag is set on this row. In the above example, after defining Scott in the detail tab, add Scott as the default authorized user. Other Authorized users can be another buyer but is normally the sales Person’s immediate supervisor.

For Scott Popiel I have set up the authorized users like below (This is also visible in the tree on the first screen shot above):

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Posted in Epicor, Epicor 9 | No Comments »

Optimizing Epicor 9 Performance – Binary Data Dump

Friday, April 6th, 2012

Epicor Tips & Tricks, Database Optimization

 

This question came in and we thought the answer might be helpful to other Epicor end users.

Question

Hello all,

Epicor support has suggested we do a binary database dump to improve our scatter factor and to speed up our Epicor database & program. We are using Epicor 9.05.606 with a Progress 32 bit database and we are wondering if anyone else has performed a binary database dump and if there is anything we should watch out for (any gotchas) as we proceed through the binary dump.

Any information / suggestions / help would be very much appreciated.

Answer


Essentially a Binary Data Dump means exporting all your data to a file and reloading it in straight.  Conceptually very similar to Defragmenting your hard disk, but in this case you are defragmenting your database file.

Make sure you have a good backup or two.

I would first restore the Test or Pilot database and run the binary dump and reload to get a time estimate that you database will take. The bigger the database the longer this process will take. You do not want to start a a 24 hour process and only have 10 hours to do it in.

Test the pilot or test database after the dump and load. Primary data entry screen, BAQ’s some big Crystal reports. If everything looks good then run on your production database.

I personally have never heard of a problem doing a progress dump and a load, but better safe than sorry.

Dale Schuerman
Senior Epicor Consultant

 

—-

Some additional Input thanks to Justin Muller of VDG.:

If a dump and load has never been done before, and you have gone through several upgrades, then you can probably expect pretty big gains in performance. One of the the things that happens with the upgrades is that new fields are added to existing records. Since that naturally makes a given record bigger, if there is not adequate space within a given database block, the record must be split across blocks. This is the worst type of scatter (far worse than records being scattered across blocks). Progress loads database blocks into memory cache (the number of blocks that can reside in memory is determined by the -B parameter). If you pull up a record split across blocks, you may end having to read off the disk 2 database blocks for a single record (if they are not already in cache) – and of course when that happens Progress has to dump 2 blocks out of memory (so someone else may have to reload ‘their’ blocks again – even if all they do is hit the refresh button. Depending on the number of upgrades and the records that were affected, it could even be worse in that a record could be split over even more than two blocks.

As a side note: depending on your hardware and database size doing a bulk load may be fast enough, and is certainly simpler than doing a binary dump/load.

 

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Posted in Epicor 9 | No Comments »

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