My company is currently migrating to Epicor and we’re hitting a bit of an issue/concern with handling customers between Epicor companies.
We have a Canadian entity and an American entity and we setup out customers in either or company (with inter-company setup to link them). Orders can come into either company but we do so on rare occasion where a customer is purchasing for the opposite region.
Our concern is the speed and ease of responding to customer care telephone support calls. When a customer calls in they often supply a 6-digit customer number legacy number from our previous ERP. The old system would detect and switch to the company automatically. In Epicor you have to click home then switch companies. This can be very tedious an inconvenient when you’re running a fast-paced support hotline.
We’ve brainstormed some ideas but none are clear winners. There doesn’t seem to be a direct technical solution to this.
Option 1 - Add a suffix value to a customer ID representing the company. i.e. 28394U or 28394C. This helps determine which Epicor company to navigate to by just retaining the number.
Option 2 - Instruct your team to keep both Epicor companies open in separate tabs and determine which company to pull a customer record from by switching between them.
Option 3 - Create a bookmarklet in the browser that lets someone enter the company number and redirect the browser to the relevant company + profile loaded. This would require a fetch call to the REST API and then some logic to redirect.
Option 4 - Somehow build in Option 3 directly into Kinetic. Perhaps a conveniently placed textbox on the customer page or elsewhere (still learning where I can inject dynamic UI elements) that performs the logic and redirects.
Honestly option 4 would be ideal. I don’t want to maintain any separate utilities or settle for workarounds.
I’m a bit surprised this isn’t easier. How have other people solved or managed this sort of concern?
If you add Order Entry to your Favorites, you can specify which Company/Site you want it to open in directly from the shortcut. Same thing is true if you add a shortcut to your homescreen for it.
This allows you to save dedicated versions for each company. You’ll likely keep your home company open all the time, and only open the other one as needed.
Companies are intended to have a bit of a wall between them. Yes, users can cross over the wall, but this is by design. Sites are intended to be more transparent.
Thanks for the reply Chad. I suppose that would make switching slightly more ergonomic but it doesn’t totally solve the problem. The customer care specialize would have to attempt to do a lookup in one company first and then switch to the other company in case it’s not found. It’s not ideal. I’m looking for a more automated solution.
An idea that I came up with last night is to use Application Studio to detect the Customer’s company and if it’s not the same display a button that would let the customer care rep switch to the other company. It would just be a matter of hiding/showing the button if the condition is met then an onClick to redirect.
The question is can I reliably redirect the user to the same customer profile in the other company? Maybe just a string manipulation of the URL?
You could make a cross company baq and add that as a widget to the homescreen with filters. The agent could then type in the customer id in the widget filter to see the company, then with Chad’s suggestion click the shortcut with the proper company.
Not sure if that is more work for the agent though
Enterprise search was a killer feature, but about a year ago they “disabled” it for cloud due to performance issues, with no word on if ever it’s coming back. They are still charging us for it though.
Yikes. That’s the kind of thing I don’t want to hear lol.
This thread has been helpful, thank you all for your input. It’s sad that this isn’t easier out of the box but fortunately Application Studio makes it solvable.
I would also suggest what Jeff recommended which is a cross company BAQ. You could filter for the customer, which would have a row for each company. Then the “right click” functionality will attempt to open the selected app in the correct company in a new tab. This has been somewhat buggy for us, but the functionality is there and is very quick way when it works.
Just make sure the dashboard you use for this is Classic and not Kinetic, no open with into a company other than the company that you launched the dashboard from in Kinetic.
You know, you might be correct. We’re on 2024.2.12 and our Kinetic dashboards and home screen BAQ widgets attempt to open in the correct company, but I just tried it again and was 0/10. When attempting to open in the other company we just get a mostly blank page. This was what I was referring too as ‘buggy’. I was pretty sure it worked occasionally and thought others might have better luck, but maybe not.
Weird. It 100% is attempting to open the right screen in the correct company for us, you can tell from the URL. Are you getting the same issue as we are, where it just doesn’t work/load?
