Building a Style Guide for Epicor Kinetic

Dashboards are often developed to solve an immediate business need. A production team needs better visibility into open jobs. Finance needs a clearer view of outstanding transactions. Customer service needs faster access to order information. Over time, these individual solutions can become an important part of how users interact with Epicor Kinetic.

The challenge is that dashboards are rarely designed all at once. They are created by different people, for different departments, and at different stages of an organization's ERP journey. Without shared standards, inconsistencies naturally begin to appear.

One dashboard may use red to indicate an overdue item, while another uses red for an error. Similar fields may be labeled "Cust," "Customer," and "Customer Name." One dashboard may place key performance indicators at the top of the screen, while another requires users to search through several sections to find the same type of information.

Individually, these differences may seem minor. Collectively, they create unnecessary cognitive effort for users and make the ERP environment more difficult to navigate and maintain.

A practical Epicor Kinetic style guide can help solve this problem by establishing common design principles for dashboards, BAQs, labels, visualizations, and other user-facing elements.

More Than Visual Consistency

A Kinetic style guide should not be confused with a corporate brand guide. Its primary purpose is not to make every dashboard look identical or to reproduce an organization's marketing standards inside the ERP system.

Instead, it should function as a lightweight internal design system for Kinetic.

The objective is consistency in how information is communicated. Users should be able to move from one dashboard to another and recognize familiar patterns. Developers and administrators should also have a common reference when creating new dashboards, rather than making the same design decisions independently each time. An effective guide should establish standards in five core areas.

1. Use Color to Communicate Meaning

Color is one of the fastest ways to communicate information visually, but it becomes less effective when its meaning changes from screen to screen.

For example, if red represents a critical exception on one dashboard, it should not be used simply as a decorative accent on another. If green indicates that an item has been completed successfully, users should be able to interpret that meaning consistently wherever the convention appears.

A style guide should therefore define a limited color palette and, more importantly, establish the purpose of each color.

This may include:

• Status colors: Critical, warning, normal, completed, inactive, or informational states

• Category colors: Colors used to distinguish departments, modules, or types of information when necessary

• Neutral colors: Standard backgrounds, headers, borders, and other structural elements

• Exceptions: Situations where a color should specifically not be used

Color should reinforce information, not become the only way information is communicated. Important statuses should also be identifiable through labels, icons, values, or other visual cues. This improves clarity and helps prevent users from having to interpret meaning based on color alone.

The goal is simple: when users encounter the same visual treatment in different areas of the system, it should communicate the same type of information.

2. Standardize Labels and Terminology

Typography within an ERP environment is naturally constrained by the application, but organizations still control much of the language users see.

Dashboard names, BAQ column headings, field labels, tile descriptions, panel titles, and abbreviations all contribute to the user experience.

A style guide should answer questions such as:

• Should dashboard and panel titles use Title Case or sentence case?

• Should "Customer" ever be abbreviated as "Cust"?

• When should technical Epicor terminology be preserved?

• How should dates, quantities, percentages, and currency values be displayed?

• How long should labels be before they become difficult to read or are truncated?

The most important principle is not necessarily which convention is selected. It is that the convention is understood and applied consistently.

Terminology should also reflect the people using the dashboard. A technically accurate database field name may not be the clearest label for an operational user. Where appropriate, user-facing labels should describe information in language that is familiar to the business while preserving the underlying logic of the system.

3. Match the Visualization to the Question

Charts should help users understand information more quickly than they could by reading the underlying records. When the wrong visualization is used, the opposite can happen.

A simple visualization standard can help dashboard developers choose a chart based on the question the data is intended to answer.

Business Question	Typical Visualization
How is a value changing over time?	Line chart
How do categories compare?	Bar or column chart
What proportion does each category represent?	Donut or pie chart, used selectively
What is the current value of an important metric?	KPI tile or scorecard
Where are values concentrated or where are the exceptions?	Appropriate distribution or comparison chart

These should be guidelines rather than rigid rules. The structure and volume of the underlying data still matter.

The guide should also identify visualization practices to avoid. Too many categories, unnecessary legends, excessive colors, crowded labels, and multiple competing charts can make a dashboard technically impressive but operationally difficult to use.

Before adding a visualization, ask a basic question: What decision or observation should this chart make easier? If that question does not have a clear answer, the visualization may not belong on the dashboard.

4. Establish Naming Conventions for Dashboards and BAQs

Naming conventions may not receive as much attention as visual design, but they have a significant impact on long-term maintainability.

As an Epicor environment grows, poorly structured names can make dashboards and BAQs increasingly difficult to search, understand, and manage. Temporary names can also become permanent simply because the object eventually moves into production.

A naming convention should make it possible to understand an object's purpose without opening it.

Depending on the organization's environment, a naming structure might identify elements such as:

[Functional Area] - [Process] - [Purpose]

For example:

Finance - AP - Open Invoices

The same principle can be applied to supporting BAQs using an organization's established technical naming standards.

The exact format is less important than having a format that is documented, scalable, and consistently followed. Version numbers, personal names, "final," "test," and similar temporary identifiers should generally be managed through development and deployment practices rather than becoming part of permanent production naming.

Clear naming becomes increasingly valuable as the number of custom objects grows and responsibility for maintaining them changes over time.

5. Create a Predictable Information Hierarchy

Consistency does not mean every dashboard must use the exact same layout. A production dashboard and a finance dashboard may serve very different purposes.

They can, however, follow the same principles of information hierarchy.

A useful starting point is:

• Top: High-priority KPIs and information requiring immediate attention

• Middle: Trends, comparisons, charts, and supporting context

• Bottom: Detailed grids and transactional records

This structure follows a natural progression from summary to analysis to detail.

More important than the exact placement of individual components is the priority given to information. The most important information should not compete visually with secondary data. Users should be able to understand what requires attention within seconds of opening the dashboard.

Whitespace and restraint matter as well. A dashboard does not become more useful simply because every available area contains a tile, chart, or grid. In many cases, removing a low-value component improves usability more than adding another visualization.

Building the Guide Without Overcomplicating It

One reason style guides fail is that organizations try to document everything before anyone can use them. A better approach is to begin with the current environment.

Identify several of the most frequently used dashboards and review them side by side. Look for differences in color usage, terminology, naming, chart selection, layout, and information hierarchy. These differences provide a practical starting point because they reveal where standards would have the greatest immediate value.

From there, build the guide incrementally. Start with the areas that affect users most frequently, such as status colors and terminology. Establish naming conventions for new development. Add visualization guidance using examples from actual business scenarios. Then develop layout principles that can be applied as dashboards are created or redesigned.

Existing dashboards do not necessarily need to be rebuilt immediately. In many environments, it is more practical to apply the standards to new development first and update existing dashboards when they undergo meaningful changes.

Make the Guide Visual and Practical

The format of the style guide matters almost as much as its content. A lengthy document filled with abstract rules is unlikely to become part of the development process. A shorter reference containing screenshots, examples, naming patterns, approved colors, and clear before-and-after comparisons is much easier to use.

The guide might live in SharePoint, an internal knowledge base, or another documentation platform already used by the organization. What matters is that the people designing and maintaining Kinetic dashboards know where to find it and can update it as standards evolve.

Whenever possible, use examples from the organization's actual Kinetic environment. Showing an approved dashboard layout is more useful than describing one. Showing an effective and ineffective use of status color makes the rule easier to understand. Showing the preferred BAQ naming structure removes ambiguity for the next developer.

The style guide should be treated as a living reference, not a document that is completed once and forgotten.

Consistency Is Ultimately About Usability

A well-designed Kinetic dashboard should reduce the amount of interpretation required from the user.

When colors have predictable meanings, labels follow common terminology, visualizations answer clear questions, objects are named systematically, and information appears in a logical hierarchy, users spend less time figuring out the interface and more time working with the information it provides.

The benefits also extend beyond appearance. Consistent standards make new dashboards easier to design, existing dashboards easier to maintain, and development decisions easier to communicate across teams.

As an Epicor Kinetic environment evolves, customization is almost inevitable. Inconsistency does not have to be.

A practical style guide provides the framework needed to let the system grow while preserving a coherent and familiar experience for the people who use it every day.