Project Delay

We are looking for a way to track project delays in Epicor. As in, a customer doesn’t make a required progress payment, then we have a “customer delay” and don’t work on the projects. We added a custom drop-down menu to the project entry.

This tells us what the delay is, but I would like to track how long each delay happens for. Eventually be able to report on the different type of delays across projects. “Projects over $100,000 on average have 2 weeks of customer delays” for example.

I don’t see anything pre-built in the system for this, so looking for ideas!

Thanks,
Dave

I don’t have a lot of experience with tasks, but could you create a task that is called customer delay? I think that they have start and end dates related to them, and you could add up the time there. Again, we don’t use tasks here as we’ve found the task system too difficult to work with, but it’s just an idea.

1 Like

Agree. We have tried tasks but doesn’t quite have the functionality we are looking for.

another idea you could try, would be to turn on the logging for that field. You might be able to go through the list and determine start and end dates for when statuses change.

If your Status field is a custom dropdown, then any logic you want attach to it will also have to be custom. This one looks like it can get complicated pretty quickly, as you might have multiple status changes on a particular project, and with each change you’ll need to do date math to add to your “delay days” bucket. If all you need is the total number of days when the Status equals “delay”, you can probably do that with another couple of UD fields on the Project table, but if you want to actually track each individual status change you’ll probably need a child UD table.

I still like Brandon’s idea but how about with a Delay Phase? It will still have a start, end, and completion date. You can assign people (Finance) tasks to complete to get the payment made. Same for engineering approvals. Someone should still manage the delay. Now you have a phase for each delay and the duration of that delay. You could also make the phase a sub-phase of the waiting phase to show which phases are getting held up the most.

Mark W.

Brandon Anderson, Mark_Wonsil

Agree, Delay Phase is probably the simplest and easiest to implement. As we progress, I will post updates.

Thanks all for the ideas!

@Dave_Dortman - What did you guys end up doing? We just implemented Project, and the PM’s are asking to build out “Hold” functionality.

I was considering adding a boolean UD field (Hold=True/False) and another one tied to UD Codes for hold reasons.

There is an Active/Inactive flag on the Project record that you may be able to leverage.

Mark - We thought about that, but chose to use that for truly dead projects, not ones on temporary hold. Our PM’s are liking the idea of having hold reasons.

Later on we could leverage date tracking. I get to teach myself (with the help of searching this amazing forum of Epicor gurus!) how to write on/off hold dates to a table and track durations. Our PM’s also want an easy button to push dates out for all checklist tasks (we’re currently using an excel template to paste-insert the checklist tasks with dates. We export the grid view into excel, use a formula to add X days, then paste-update).

You mentioned adding a boolean but if it were me, I would definitely use UserCodes and a text field.

Truly dead projects are Closed and they cannot be re-opened (supposedly).

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But if you’re project is only mostly dead then a UserCode in a UD field to add reasons for inactivity should do the job.