CRM Setup

Epicor ERP 10
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Does anyone have any good resources, videos, write-ups, etc. on the set up of CRM? I have gone through the documentation on the Application User Guide and while it does a good job of demonstrating how to complete individual tasks, it doesn’t really step through setting up the “system”.

I am thinking something like a quick tutorial on setting up and using a basic CRM for Quote to Sales Order type work flow.

My goal in what I am doing now is to get a quotation work flow to go through 5 steps, Qualification, Costing, Pricing, Customer Submittal, and finally resolution. I not only want to track what quotes are in those stages but also the dollar value.

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Did you look in the implementation guide?

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I did not see that entry right away, and it does expose some settings that I will need. However, it is not what I am looking for.
I can see what all of the fields and table do, either through the field help, through the application help, or even the implementation guide.
What I am really looking for is a more comprehensive guide to specific set ups. Like how the application is intended to be used. For instance, the concepts behind the task list, how to track and measure opportunities, etc.

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That’s a big ask, and I’m hoping someone else chimes in. Our experience is that the CRM module is very entrepreneurial in that you will have to build a solution that works for you. There are no cookie cutter guides that I’ve been able to find. That said… your challenge is going to be identifying (and understanding) the tools provided by Epicor, overlaying your business process, then determining just how much customization you’re willing to undertake in order to make the Epicor tools work.

Epicor provided tools:

Quotes - There are lots of fields and tabs in this program, but they don’t really link up to any mgmt utility that you would use to manage the CRM function in your company - no opportunity planner/viewer, no annual forecasts, nada. You’ll be building those through dashboards or customizations, but at least you have a starting point with lots of fields and tabs.

Tasks (Workflows) - Manually lay out your business process flow and break into “Milestones” and smaller tasks. This epicor feature is simply an “attached checklist” of those activities. The performance of a business activity does not complete a task - you have to open your quote - go to the checklist (Tasks) and tell Epicor about it.
As your business process dictates who is to complete the various activities, the Task function allows you to identify the user(s) who have permission to check the box telling Epicor the task is complete.

Product configurator - I suspect this is where you’ll do your costing, but my company doesn’t use this tool, so I can’t provide any thoughts on it. I know my sales folks didn’t find it interesting enough to use.

Case management - To accommodate some of our business processes within Epicor (so that we can track and report on them using dashboards, etc, we use Case Entry. This allows us to maintain a record of a significant interaction with a customer.

CRM Calls - We use for all routine interactions. We’ve mandated the use of this tool across departments, limited though it may be, it is an effective history of all interactions. We’ve categorized the various types of interactions, so our accounting folks can also use the tool to look back at all the times we’ve need to contact the customer for “credit” issues, for example.

Pricing - This is painful for me (the IT guy) because Epicor provides the table necessary to establish price lists, and Order Entry which interfaces very nicely with Order Entry. But, maintenance is a nightmare. There is no overall management tool to analyze and/or plan and implement increases - it is the manual effort from hell. The only way I’ve found to handle this is to have the sales coordinator provide me the the details of the planned increase, and I schedule a series of SQL scripts in order to make the required tables, en masse.

Regarding the last two broad areas…

Customer submittal - entirely outside Epicor, but we added a task requiring it. So someone has to check that box.

Resolution - Again, entirely outside of Epicor.

We have added automation to the tasks so that notifications occur when tasks are complete, and when approvals are required.

We’ve cobbled these things together with a few dashboards that enable mgmt to view, at a higher level, the overall state of things - RMAs, Quotes - including due dates, we had to create price sheets and a bunch of other things, but we make it work.

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Andrew:
Thanks for the write up. This is definitely some good information. I have a pretty good idea of how I want the business process to flow. I am just trying to set it up in Epicor and not only get it working, but figure out how to report metrics based on it.

Your comments will give me some good things to consider as I do this.

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This was very interesting to me - thanks for taking the time to write it.

We use CRM quite extensively and I’m very relieved to hear another opinion that it takes manual work to get it right! I’ve had a lurking worry that we went overboard in doing that.

Interestingly we think we’ve pretty much cracked pricing, but aren’t quite satisfied with some of the rest. We lean quite heavily on cases, but for some reason our users don’t like differentiating tasks and putting them into workflows, so those are very much underused. Fascinating to compare.

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I think that the hardest part about tasks in E-10 is the difficulties in setting up/understanding the permissions to make them easy enough to work with. We tried them before, but never really figured out who could do what, so even preliminary testing was very hard to do. Initial frustration was high and immediate, so the use was never really given a chance. (in our setting anyways)

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We left the security out of the picture by giving everybody relevant permission to do everything, but couldn’t get buy-in even so. In our case I think it was getting acceptance that logging tasks saved more time and trouble overall than it took to do.

Users are currently happy with what we’ve ended up with, but I suspect Zendesk or something will become more and more attractive as we continue to grow and get busier. My impression is a dedicated solution has to be more efficient, it’s just at what point we really need that efficiency to free up Epicor for its core functionality.

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I also struggled with the “permissioning”. There are voices here in this forum (mine included) who advocate for the ability to clone users - what a huge time saver that would be. Setting up a sales user, with all the functionality we’re discussing, along with territory security, and context menu personalizations are incredibly challenging to manage and maintain. Our environment is pretty secure, so creating a user is itself a laborious task full of checklists.

Back to the topic at hand, I wanted to add that, for task authorization, we’ve created “phantom users”, this way as folks change jobs, we just have to manage who has authorization to the “Quote originators” user, or the “Internal Processor” workforce user, for example. This way, we can create the task workflow and assign to the appropriate generic/phantom user. I think it support groups too, but it’s also challenging.

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