We made it to Kinetic 2025.2.12 from Classic 2023! Thought it may be helpful for the community, one way or the other, with how we managed the migration and just what the update from 2023 to 2025 was like.
TD is a group of companies and Kinetic serves 5 companies around 50 direct active users, many custom programs integrated via rest and WCF (still works in 2025.2 btw) 100’s of Crystal Reports, more external access databases then I care to remember or know about, MES + Warehouse and Logistics software I wrote (we were rocking PDA picking from touch screen tablets many, many, many years ago), SugarCRM, EDI, AI assistants and 20 years of weird and wonderful things we have done to this ERP system since Vantage 8.03. The I.T team are Business Systems minded, and all this was done inhouse and this is on prem. And we moved to a new server to keep us going for the next number of years.
Long road to kinetic.
Our primary blocker to moving to Kinetic was always Crystal Reports. I never got around and still haven’t to getting the team to migrate the Crystal Reports for the group to SSRS as just like the 20 years of mods we got very good at Crystal Reports, and we have it doing things you just cannot do in SSRS (and IMHO SSRS is a pale second place to Crystal). We did a soft “we are moving to kinetic so I.T are not implementing new processes into Classic or doing new mods in classic” about a year before the update to start to warm the userbase to the change coming (boil the frog). About 6 months out I went to the directors with a “back to base” plan where I.T would not migrate any mods unless the userbase could tell us which ones they use and the onus was on them, not I.T, to tell us. It was made crystal clear ‘if they don’t tell us they will be going live on base’. That was then communicated to the department heads informing them that 20 years of modification and know how has just vanished overnight, the new technology stack couldn’t support all the things we did in classic IE like directly integrating scanning from desktop scanners (we did get this working in the end, shout out to Paul Harvey), that we needed to clean house after 20 years and the big driver to update was the end of support for 2023 with the need to move to kinetic from Classic as it was being removed from the product in 2026. Naturally, we lent hard on the last two reasons 
For our migration strategy, which some will point out it was a bad idea, we pointed the users the website with LIVE Kinetic 2023 and the premise for “back to base” was simple. “Go onto the web page. When you cannot do your job anymore because feature X is missing IE a text box go back to classic and log an issue with IT”. This gets rid of the wasted time issue users feel when it comes to testing as part entered orders etc in Kinetic can be picked up in Classic so is the most pragmatic approach we could take. So we got some good response then it all went quite. I.T meanwhile were wrestling with the dev tools due to a bunch of bugs which has been fixed by 2025.2. We dumped nearly all the auto converted screens for back to base but the dashboards sort of worked so we kept them (I had originally planned to leave the dashboards for Kinetic 2025 to upgrade as it does a much better job than 2023 did, obviously).
About 3 months out and 2 delays on the go-live date it seemed like the userbase had forgot to keep trying Kinetic so we soft launched Kinetic into the desktop client without telling them to get the userbase re-engaged (you have instance roll back by changing the menu item should anything bad happen so this was calculated). Naturally, we got some feedback. By and large everything was ok but printing not working in 2023 (we use Crystal Remember) was causing some frustrations, because we had to keep telling the same people this over and over. Positively, we realised a good chunk of people had just kept to the web version of kinetic after we did the changes for them after the back to base workshops which was a nice surprise as we had some comeback when the new thing was just labelled bad. Lucky the soft migration stuck and apart from 4 screens (one had a bug in and didn’t work n 2023) most of the userbase started using Kinetic 2023 as a daily driver with the promise of some fixes and improvements coming in the next couple of weeks when we upgrade to 2025.
User Experience
Kinetic from the userbase can generally be summed up as “getting stuff in is slower than Classic but getting stuff out much faster”. It’s a simple fact for us that datasets that used to paste insert in 20 minutes are now measured in hours and the response from Epicor is ‘working as expected’. Also, the data grids not downloading all information is causing the userbase to learn some new tricks and needing education on why some filters don’t work unless you get all the data (this is acceptable to us). After a few weeks people are getting used to is as the muscle memory is starting to build and input is getting faster but ultimately data grids are just worse in Kinetic (no DMT isn’t suitable for these things either). Our first thought was to write some customer programs but I then got the bill for cloud then wondered why I am spending more I.T resource internally to fix an ERP regression.
Fulfilment workbench is still in classic. Our warehouse team need to manage anything from a single washer sent via post to 80ft containers. The flexibility of the data grids in Classic allows them to still do their job. Epicor have back ported some of the datagrid features for us to .12 (thanks to Dev and Support). Either way we will do what we do and I’ve started writing an AI agent to do the pick assignment along with route optimisations.
ERP Software Update
We have done a number of on prem upgrades over the years and this was smooth as most upgrades have been since Epicor 10 (we skipped Epicor 9). Having the new server meant we had the environment setup so we just grabbed the backup and restored it to the new server. As our update cadence is about once every 2 years, I spend about 4 days worth of human time on upgrades every two years, upgrades are a non event for infrastructure I.T.
End user deployment
As I said Fulfilment workbench didn’t work well so we are still on if for classic so we had to deploy the classic client. Regardless of this the point interface for Kinetic is the website for everyone, 2025 web will load up Classic menu items directly if you have the agent setup right, and the agent also does Crystal Report printing \0/ (couple of bugs needs fixing by again Epicor have the one in dev so thanks Epicor …). We have long since had a script that we use to deploy the new version of Classic with the old. The script essentially checks for the previous Epicor install then runs the install for the new one then STARTS the program in the background. If the new Epicor folder exists it skips the install. This essentially meant we could always deploy the go-live version weeks before we went live and the user has a fully installed client on their machine. This time we deleted the shortcuts to the classic client and removed the sysconfig files to the server (the edge agent json allows this the GUI doesn’t) along with deploying the shortcut to the new web version (which used a forwarder on while the old ERP server) so it could be used straight away and people would always get to the right live Kinetic version.
The Crystal reports runtime was another thing. As you need a newer one for the Epicor agent this one breaks the 2023 Client so this was hand installed on the day , we usually use GPO to distribute this but that isn’t a precise timing tool, just in case the update was a failure we couldn’t automate this. FYI Crystal Reports SP34 has a bug in it that stops it loading images from an HTTP endpoint (we have a https service we wrote that generates a 2d barcode as an image for our labels so this was bad). Luckily SP35 has a one time bug fix in it that restores the http endpoint images and works with Kinetic 2025.2.
Go-LIVE
go-live was ok. Found an issue with external databases due to OUR security so not an Epicor issue (we have a loopback in Kinetic where we have views on the Kinetic database that we extensively use for reporting and I mean extensively and we needed to make this view available to the ERP system proper). Some users couldn’t load Kinetic (failure to read email) but we are still going. We have picked up some printing issues in AP invoice but so far nothing major and support are on it.
Hopefully the above is of use. If anyone has any detailed questions about thing sin specific I would be happy to answer.