Any words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated.
Don't scrimp on the education. We had someone come in for a week and that
was a good beginning, but we still needed hand holding to get our first
mapping done. Extol provides excellent support, so that will help.
Don't underestimate the time needed to alter backend processes. We thought
we would have an easy time because our order entry package is built of
processors. We would simply map the data, call the processor and get
incoming orders passed into the system. I should have realized, but there
is a wealth of data validation that goes on during order entry. Getting
the order in involved a lot of lookups that had nothing to do with the
customer's order--it was all about getting our regions/territory
breakdowns, the appropriate salesman coded, checking customer discount
pricing, etc. If you plan to do PO receipts, start thinking of what data
on your system actually comes from the customer (their name, item numbers,
requested price, PO number, etc.) and what is normally added during order
entry. We found it easiest to keep that outside of Extol. We fill in the
records with the information from EDI, call a program that fills in the
rest of the chained information from ancillary records, then show the
orders to inside sales in the standard order entry screen. Inside sales
simply pulled up the order and tried to close it, at which point all the
standard checks could be run. At some point you can bypass this entirely
when you're confident enough of the process.
I would recommend creating a base message class for each document you plan
to use. This can serve as a template for future customers. While Extol
will allow you to copy a working message class, it's much easier to have a
stripped down version that you build up, rather than take a customized one
that you have to remove functionality from, then build it back in.
The good news is that Extol's support is great. The bad news comes when
you upgrade your box and they charge you for the increased CPW on the new
box. It's a great way for them to get an extra >$5k from us every four
years, but it still rubs me raw that we have no increase in the usage of
the software, but have to pay for the convenience of having the software
on the same iSeries as our ERP package. We'll probably dump them when we
update our ERP package because of that.....
midrange.com
