This follows my blunt explanation of your choices when hiring outside Epicor expertise.

If, after that, you are wondering about an independent expert (yes, like META eight), you may wonder what you’re letting yourself in for.

You may be wondering because you’re the person responsible for the Epicor system at your business (Hi, I’ve been in your shoes!) and while you could really do with help of some kind, you really don’t want to be responsible for expense and things going wrong or not getting completed that are out of your hands. And, whether you admit it to yourself or not, you worry that you may undermine your own position in some way by showing up a lack of competence or looking less necessary.

Or, you may be responsible for a wider part of the business, or all of it, and this is on your mind because you have a problem to solve.

There’s a simple short-cut if you want. Talk to us. Talk to me, in fact – I don’t bite, and I don’t push. If you don’t like what I say then I don’t chase either.

But that said, here’s what we, at least, aim to do for you.

What we like is a defined need. That’s usually a more or less complex project related to your Epicor system outside your business-as-usual. We take that, and give you a solution for a known price (give or take how flexible you want to be about what you’re asking for). We also make sure that you know how it’s done and how it works, so there’s no subtle elastic keeping you tied to us for anything related to that in future. As a business, you pay for results and new capability, not more staff.

Personally, I’ve yet to do any work for a company that didn’t have its own capable Epicor experts in-house, and that’s the way I like it. A system as capable and complex as Kinetic needs at least someone who knows it well and can configure and develop.

When you’re in one environment, though, projects and needs do come up that are new. What someone from outside gives you is instant experience on tap when you need it. And you can benefit from that experience not only directly, in more quickly and reliably getting a particular thing done, but also indirectly as you see how it’s done. Far from being a threat, that’s a boost.

Effectively, you have training thrown in, as well as projects completed that otherwise would be a problem.

A good independent Epicor consultant/developer is a force multiplier. Not a replacement for anyone you have, not even like an extra member of staff, quite. If they’re good, they’re more than that – you have, on-call, experience and capability that’s different to the kind achieved by being very deep into one particular system. And that not only lets existing staff focus cleanly on what they’re most needed for, it gives them access to new knowledge as they find they need it too.

OK, you say, so how do we know whether a consultant or developer is good?

Well, that’s quite easy and low-risk, too. You try them with a small project. That’s the great thing about independent people, too. No big commitment needed, and if it doesn’t work you haven’t lost much.