Maximizing Manufacturing Efficiency: A Project Manager's Guide to Epic One's Project Manager Mood

The review with your biggest customer wraps up at 3:30. Engineering agreed to a revised drawing, purchasing promised a firm date on the material, and someone said they'd send the customer a summary by tomorrow. Nobody wrote anything down that you can actually forward. This is the first post in our Use Cases series, one for each Epic One mood, and we're starting with the one built for exactly this moment: Project Manager. It's the mood Ludwig Solutions LLC uses. Ludwig Solutions is an Epicor ERP implementation and IT consulting firm for complex manufacturers, so its project managers spend their days in customer meetings and work sessions. The scenario below is illustrative. It walks through how a project manager at Ludwig Solutions would use the features described in the Epic One User Guide.

What the Project Manager mood is for

In the app, Project Manager is described as "Transcripts in, documents out." It turns meetings and work sessions into documents, keeps a record of what was done for customers, and learns from your Dropbox so the documents match your house style. It can produce meeting minutes, action-item lists, trackers, status reports, work-session logs, and the Discovery, Planning and Design Spec documents. Once it has learned your templates, each one comes out in your company's format.

From the meeting to the minutes

Back to that 3:30 call. Say a project manager at Ludwig Solutions recorded it, or kept rough notes. They attach the transcript with the paperclip (audio, video or text all work) and ask Epic One to turn it into meeting minutes with action items. It drafts them in their format. If something's missing, like who attended or the date, it asks before it builds, rather than guessing. Recorded meetings from the recording button land in this mood too. They review the draft, fix what needs fixing, and have something they can send the same afternoon, not the next morning.

Documents that match the way you write them

Most shops already have a way their documents look. The Project Manager mood learns it. An admin can upload example documents under Admin, then Document format templates, or simply say "learn my document templates from Dropbox." You can also point it at a project folder in Dropbox and it reads the folder, learns the formats and facts inside, and tells you what it picked up. You connect Dropbox once under Settings. When a document is finished, you can ask Epic One to export it back to a folder of your choosing, so it lands where the team already looks.

For the bigger documents, there's a question-and-answer step. Ask for a Discovery document for a customer and Epic One asks for the details it doesn't have, one question at a time, then builds the document. It draws on the transcripts or notes you've uploaded or taught it. The same goes for Planning documents and Design Specs. If you've logged calls over a few weeks, the document reflects them instead of starting from a blank page.

Work-session logs and decks

Not every record comes from a meeting. If you fixed something for a customer, you can tell Epic One what you did and ask it to log a work session. You choose between an internal log and a client-ready summary, so the customer sees a clean record of the work and your team keeps the detailed one. There's also PowerPoint support: Epic One builds real .pptx files in your brand, with bullets, speaker notes, and screenshots of public websites. The guide's own example is one slide per client with their homepage.

Every document the Project Manager mood can create

The Epic One User Guide covers this in sections 09, 10 and 11. Here is the full list, using Ludwig Solutions as the example. A project manager there starts the same way each time: click the paperclip and choose "Create documents from it." They can upload a transcript (.txt, .docx, .pdf, .vtt or .md), a meeting recording (video or audio), or both together. A recording with no transcript is transcribed automatically, which takes a few minutes for a longer meeting. Epic One reads the file, gives a short summary, then asks one question at a time about which documents they want and which customer they're for.

Meetings and projects: meeting minutes are the default, a structured summary of the call. Action items come as a task list, and they can pair it with an Excel tracker for owners, due dates and priorities. A report gives them a project report or summary. Discovery, Planning and Design Spec documents each follow the company's learned format, so they come out looking like the ones the team already writes.

Design Specs have a shortcut. During a planning session, someone says "start design spec," talks through the design, then says "end design spec." When Epic One builds the Planning document, it spots those two markers and writes a separate Design Spec from what was said between them. One meeting can hold several marked sections.

Work Session documents: after a working session with or for a customer, they record it with the recording button and pick the work-session option. Epic One asks for the customer and what they worked on, then offers two styles. The internal log is factual and specific: systems touched, records changed, exact values, issues and workarounds. The client-ready summary is polished and focused on value, written to be sent to the customer as is. Either one includes the customer, the author, the date, the session length, a task-by-task narrative with screenshots, and a Follow-ups and Next Steps section. Each session is also remembered under the customer's name, so they can later ask what has been done for that customer this month.

End User Guides and EUPs: record a process on screen, answer a few questions, review the screenshots, and Epic One produces a formatted Word document with numbered steps grouped by task, a screenshot for each section, and a metadata table. Once a process has been learned, they can also ask for a guide from the saved steps, or for a step-by-step walkthrough video. These guides and videos need the Project Manager mood. A learned procedure, or EUP, can also be run by Epic One itself. In the Epicor mood, for example, they can ask it to add a new customer. It asks for any missing fields, shows an approval card describing the changes, and then does the work, sending screenshots as it goes.

A few things hold across all of these. When they attach a recording and a transcript together, the text comes from the transcript and the screenshots come from the video, and those images can go into End User Guides, Discovery, Planning and Design Spec documents. If a document uses screenshots, they approve them first. Every document arrives as a download card in the chat, and every one is saved to Dropbox.

What it won't do on its own

Project Manager is a licensed mood, and like everything in Epic One it works inside your security setup. Each company has its own dedicated server, and access follows each person's own login. Documents are drafts for you to read and approve before they go anywhere. If you're curious how the mood fits with the rest of Epic One, the User Guide at /user-guide covers every mood, and the security page explains the data rules in plain language.