You don’t hear much about Epicor in comparison to the “big name” players of the ERP software market. But as an Epicor Partner, we’re not complaining. We know Epicor is the best kept secret in global ERP and know those who use it realize it to be true. Don’t just take our word for it; check out the functionality possible with Epicor ERP for yourself:

Single Point of Data: Internal operations need to be integrated in order to achieve global visibility.

And Epicor ERP is a comprehensive solution that helps make that visibility possible. Epicor ERP can do it all, including accounting, order processing, manufacturing, human resources and data from other functions as well as including advanced financial management reporting and analysis. With real-time and accurate information at your fingertips, you can make better business decisions that help the success of your company. Instead of gathering information from a number of different systems and then never really knowing if the data is accurate, pull from one ERP solution that encompasses all parts of your business.

Adaptable Business Architecture: Epicor ERP scales to your business needs to support long-term growth. There are multiple deployment options that help ensure you stay within your means when making an ERP software purchase, such as hosting, online functionality, and on-premises implementations. Whatever works for you, Epicor can make it happen. In addition to the beginning stages of deployment, Epicor ERP can grow with you on a global scale. Some ERP systems limit your potential, but Epicor ERP adapts the way you need it to. Epicor also provides solutions in over 30 languages so you’re not hindered in where you can do business.

Beyond offering a product designed for global business, Epicor has a global infrastructure that incorporates support centers located in every major operating region—the Americas, EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), and Asia Pacific. Through these regional centers, Epicor provides support in more than 20 languages. For more information on Epicor ERP, please contact us at Datix.

I recently had a strange issue. We had a server file system filled up because of a runaway log file. The log files were removed to free up some disk space but during this process the Progress Admin Server lost its configuration information.

I did a lot of digging and found the configuration file in c:\oe102a\properties\ubroker.properties where c:\oe102a\ is the install directory of Open Edge. There is also a backup file in c:\oe102a\properties\ubroker.properties.old. I was able to copy the contents of this file into ubroker.properties restart the Admin Server and everything came up.

In a prior post I wrote about how our sales team uses Epicor CRM for their sales and marketing activities and how they use dashboard we developed to allow for easy updating and adding of information. We have added quite a few features to the CRM dashboard over the last few months, but I am most excited about the mobile dashboard.

I find myself going to visit clients or prospects in industrial areas and wondering if these companies are on our marketing list or if we have contacted them.  In the past I would call our sales department and ask, but what I really needed was mobile access to our customer data. Last year with the release of Epicor 905 a new module called Epicor Mobile access was added to the product. Epicor Mobile Access enables you to create dashboards targeted to mobile devices, so I took our CRM dashboard and turned it mobile. Below are some screen shots of the results.

This dashboard is almost an exact copy of the CRM dashboard with some small modifications. On our CRM dashboard we have tabs for Customers, Prospects, Follow Ups and Un Called suspects, these were removed because we are only going to search for specific companies from the mobile dashboard. We used updatable BAQs so I can add new customers and notes through the dashboard. I’m going to cover updatable BAQs and their impact on our CRM system  in a post next week.

The steps to create a mobile dashboard:

1. Open your desktop dashboard in Dashboard Developer
2. Click on Actions -> Generate Mobile Dashboard
3. Choose a name for the dashboard
4. Open the mobile dashboard in Dashboard Developer and edit it as normal.

A couple of things to keep in mind when developing Epicor Mobile Dashboards:

1. Graphs and charts are not supported
2. Remove extra fields you don’t need
3. Epicor Mobile is browser based, you don’t install anything on the phone
4. IPhone, Android, Blackberry and most other mobile devices are supported.
5. After you a done using the dashboard you must logout or it continues to use a mobile license.

Epicor Mobile CRM Main Menu

Epicor Mobile CRM Menu

You can deploy as many dashboards using Epicor Mobile Access as you like. Currently we only have only have one

Epicor Mobile CRM Customer/Prospect Search

Above is a quick search I entered Epicor and clicked search to get the results below.

Epicor Mobile CRM Search Results

You can see in this screen shot the Edit button, clicking this allows you to change the customer data through the mobile dashboard. You click or tab on a record to selected it and then you can choose for the different dashboard “tabs” in the drop down box, below I chose CRM calls.

Epicor Mobile CRM Call List

From this screen you have the ability to update the call directly from the phone.

Epicor Mobile CRM Update Call

I would be interested to hear other ideas on what people would use on a mobile dashboard and specifically CRM.

One of the most common requests we get from customers is how to set a default value on a field in Epicor. Below is a simple example of how to set the default value on a customer field called Source. This process is fairly simple and works for almost any field.

In my example the source field is a user defined field in the customer table called Character10. Prior to this example I setup user codes and tied the user codes to this field.

To set a default value you use a BPM. Open Epicor and navigate to System Management -> Business Process Management -> Setup -> Method Directives

1. Choose Customer from the business object drop down and type GetNew in the method name box. Choose GetNewCustomer from the search results

BPM Search

2. After selecting that method your screen should look like this:

Customer BPM View

3. Next enter Default Source  in the directive name box, and Customer in the group box. The group allows you to easily find and group together BPMs.

Setup Step 3

4. Next click on Actions, then click the new icon. Next choose “set the specified field of the changed row to the specified expression” from the User Text drop down list.

Step 4

5. Click on “specified” to choose the field you want to change. Choose ttCustomer from the table list then click the check box next to Character10 and click OK.

Setup Step 5

6. Next click specific and enter the default value.

Step 6

7. Now your actions screen should look like the following. Click Ok.

Step 7

8. The BPM screen should look like the following. Check the enabled box and click save. Next time you create a new customer record you will see the default value in the Character10 field.

Step 8

We have a customer that wanted to ship items directly from the sales order without having to go through the shipment entry screen. The orders never change and the items are non-stock so they don’t need the functionality provided by that screen.

To streamline this process we created a button on the sales order entry screen that will automatically ship the order, it mimics the mass shipment functionality from the Shipment Entry screen. Below is the source code you can call from a button click event.

Ship Order Sample

Here is the source.

        private static void ShipSalesOrderMethod()
        {
 
            // Declare and Initialize EpiDataView Variables
            EpiDataView edvOrderHed = ((EpiDataView)(oTrans.EpiDataViews["OrderHed"]));
            Epicor.Mfg.Core.Session session = (Epicor.Mfg.Core.Session)SalesOrderForm.Session;
 
            Epicor.Mfg.BO.CustShipDataSet dsCustShip = new Epicor.Mfg.BO.CustShipDataSet();
            Epicor.Mfg.BO.PackOutDataSet dsPackOut = new Epicor.Mfg.BO.PackOutDataSet();
            System.String warnMsg = "";
            System.String creditMsg = "";
 
            // Check if valid EpiDataView Row(s) are selected
            if ((edvOrderHed.Row < 0))
            {
                MessageBox.Show("No Order Selected");
                return;
            }
 
            int salesOrder = ((int)(edvOrderHed.dataView[edvOrderHed.Row]["OrderNum"]));
 
            Epicor.Mfg.BO.CustShip custShip = new Epicor.Mfg.BO.CustShip(session.ConnectionPool);
            custShip.GetNewShipHead(dsCustShip);
            try
            {
                custShip.GetHeadOrderInfo(salesOrder, out creditMsg, dsCustShip);
                if (!"".Equals(creditMsg))
                {
                    MessageBox.Show(creditMsg);
                }
                System.String shipToCustomerList = "";
                custShip.BuildShipToCustomerList(salesOrder, out shipToCustomerList);
 
                custShip.BuildShipToList(salesOrder, 9, out shipToCustomerList);
 
                custShip.Update(dsCustShip);
 
                dsPackOut = custShip.POGetNew(salesOrder, dsCustShip.ShipHead[0].PackNum, out warnMsg);
                dsPackOut = custShip.POGetDtlList(dsCustShip.ShipHead[0].PackNum, salesOrder, "PACK", out warnMsg);
 
                custShip.PreCreateMassShipDtl(dsCustShip.ShipHead[0].PackNum, salesOrder, out warnMsg, dsCustShip);
                custShip.CreateMassShipDtl(dsCustShip.ShipHead[0].PackNum, salesOrder, dsCustShip);
 
                MessageBox.Show("" + dsCustShip.ShipHead[0].PackNum);
                custShip.MarkShipmentLines(dsCustShip);
                custShip.Update(dsCustShip);
 
                System.Boolean compliant;
 
                dsCustShip.ShipHead[0].ReadyToInvoice = true;
 
                if (!"".Equals(creditMsg))
                {
                    MessageBox.Show(warnMsg);
                }
 
                custShip.Update(dsCustShip);
                custShip.PostUpdate(dsCustShip.ShipHead[0].PackNum, out warnMsg);
                if (!"".Equals(creditMsg))
                {
                    MessageBox.Show(warnMsg);
                }
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);
            }
 
            MessageBox.Show("Done");
 
        }