Hello all. General usage question here…
We’ve traditionally had one customer service person entering orders and performing all required followups and acknowledgements all the way through shipping. There’s a process each order follows (confirmation, changes, picking, shipping, ship acknowledgements, etc.) There’s a fair amount of interactivity required - for each order.
We will now have a team of order entry personnel. Management has asked me to determine what, within base Epicor, allows for management of those interactions - so folks don’t have to constantly ask each other "did you follow up with customer X?, or “Did you fax/email that confirmation?”.
Before I start planning customizations (using user names as an ID), I’m just wondering if there are processes or tools, I’m unaware of, that would accommodate this type of team based ordering activity.
I have seen a few ways of doing this and yes Epicor has tools for this.
One way that is very visual and does not need much from Epicor is what I call a “file by pile” method. So you create a paperwork flow with file bins that track the order status. You identify the steps needed and create bins for “needs acknowledgment”, needs “follow up”, etc. if your team is all in one office location this can work OK. As a bin fills up the next person with free time tackles a bin and you would need a rule for which bins need to be emptied before people can go home. A bit old school because you need to print the paperwork to drive it, but very visual to the team.
There are tools in Epicor for workflow tasks, but you may need the Case management or CRM license for this to work with order entry, not sure there. Here you setup a work flow and as tasks are done they are checked off. Dashboards can then show the status of items by customer, order, etc.
CRM also has a call log feature that lets you log customer calls and this can have emails pasted in as well. Useful for logging customer interactions, collections calls, literature requests, order update questions, etc.
With the base system there are also Memo’s and Memo categories available in several places to keep internal notes to be updated manually per order. If you updated these after each step is done each order will have its own log and status of when steps were completed.
Identifying the processes and the process steps are probably the first step as you could and may want to use more than one of these options.
I actually like your file by pile method. It is visual, and, as it turns out, our process is paperwork intensive, so the old school nature of this approach would fit.
I was sort of hoping there’d be some sort of mgmt utility, within Epicor, that displays the process from a birds eye view, so that the manager (or even the users) can see the status of all orders and know that the next followup is required - from user A. I think this is where you introduced the workflow concept.
We do have Case mgmt and CRM but, unfortunately, Sales Order Entry is not workflow/task enabled, so it would involve back and forthing between order entry and case mgmt. For example, Quote Entry has a Task tab and is workflow enabled.
So, I appreciate your thoughts and I’ll run the file by pile method by mgmt to see if it’ll work. If I have to customize, I may see if I can adapt the concept into an Epicor visualization of some sort. The info has to be “presented” to the user, rather than requiring users to go hunt for status.
Thanks for the response, however, you’ve provided a bit to chew on and it is very much appreciated!
Strangely was speaking with a colleague moments ago with regard to process ownership, etc.
Beginning to end, the user-id per activity is stored on QUOTE/SALES ORDER/JOB CREATOR/SHIPPER/ etc.
While CRM and workflows might be awesome… I suggest starting with simple Epi-capabilities
2a) Use the CALL log and CALL types
2b) Use MEM’s and Memo types…
In the case of both YOUR COMPANY can determine the various call or memo types, attach security to those and determine who may or may not access the call or memo.
IF the business process is QUOTE… then create an SO from Quote, then Make-direct per SO-release per JOB… You can access the transactions to create a PUBLISHERs Clearign HOUSE type document, stipulating Mr X recorded the Quote
Ms Y created the SO
Job/Production planner was Fred
Shipper was suzy Q
The CALL log is AWESOME! Call types can be pre-sales… for salespersonnel in the field or office
ENG-confirmation/activity with cust
Etc… up to Finance AR collections (and secure these so the Production folks can not see the entries!)
MEMO’s are internal only and will not print (unless you for some crazy reason customize!)
ERGO: THe entire HISTORY of client/sales activity can be captured.
You can also LOG changes, capturing that information as well!
Whew!
Within CRM is the Salespersons PIPELINE and Workbench…
IF a team needs to review all aspects of the business process, instead of assigning just a SALESPERSON to a customer or territory, add the sales-team identifier as one of the four… or is it five available salespersons. You might also manipulate the stand dashboards with a UD table per SO providing user-id’s allowing access to the Sales dashboards.
EX: Four business divisions paper, wood, plastic, metal
Stick the aligned users into each of those four prod-areas, then grant them secured access within the Salemens Workbench and pipeline.
This will NOT work, if the various users witin the business process can not be define.
Joe,
thanks for your thoughts on this.
Your ‘whew’ sums up my feelings on the possibilities. Epicor does provide an array of useful tools and i will have to assemble them into a process that makes sense for our business.
Thanks MUCH to both Joe and Brad for your thoughtful comments.
nerd as am I, Chris. given the list of custom work i’m facing, however, I increasingly encourage my users to look to the built in functionality.
Interestingly, the ability to build your own functionality is a major reason we opted for Epicor. The capabilities are really impressive. But, as an IT department of 1, it can be daunting.
