Hi all-
I have been asked to first find out all the specifics on what our yearly maintenance fee for Public Cloud includes, which I have asked my CAM to provide to me, and then wondered if anyone has been successful in reducing their yearly amount they pay to Epicor? Currently we are locked into a 3 year contract that expires on 3/31/24. We currently are licensed for 50 default users and 50 Data Collection users. When I take a look at different times of the day to see how many active users we have, it seems we are way over licensed. Our company has about 250 employees with around 100 computers. Just curious if anyone is willing to share their battle story with me or am I asking something too personal. Please let me know.
Never tried, but even if you can’t, you’ll still want to get rid of excess now.
My understanding is that once they send you the 2024 invoice, it’s too late to say you don’t need this or that. I don’t know what the actual cutoff is though.
Only thing I’d add is this: in the start of the pandemic a well-meaning exec had us cut costs everywhere, and we cut licenses to save the yearly maintenance.
Comes to 2023 and we need more licenses, and the old ones don’t get re-activated - you’re starting over from scratch.
So you not only re-start the yearly maintenance, you pay the most current price for new licenses.
Oh, yeah that’s a very good point. The activation fee is 5x the yearly fee, so that is thousands of dollars when you do need to add.
@JillMetalworks I made an Epicor Function to track license usage every 30 seconds and write to a UD table. I know exactly what our peak usage is over time. You may want to do the same. I’ve written about it here before, but feel free to ask if you want help.
…You’re not still on E9, right? I would think not if you are public cloud.
I believe that is only for modules, not user seats, however I don’t know if its possible to give up seats in the cloud, I am curious to hear if anybody has done this.
Jason,
We are in the Public Cloud so we are on the latest and greatest Kinetic revision. I would be very interested in your Epicor Function. It would be great to see the trend of our license usage before we make any big decisions on what we want to do.
So now I have to ask is there any way to track the use of certain modules in Epicor? Just curious:>)
Epicor just made a huge deal of patting themselves on the back for releasing the most-voted for idea on the ideas portal (BAQ reference to another BAQ) in 2023.2. This one about license tracking is right up there in the top 5. If we keep voting for it it would be hypocritical for them not to build it.
In the meantime, you can buy menu usage tracker if you want to audit per screen (not per module).
The irritating thing is that you have to buy it from CSG and pay a whole separate invoice for it.
Ah, rats. Well, then this would need to be rebuilt from scratch… which is a good idea in itself.
So, here it is anyway. It’s ugly. It works. I would do it differently today.
Really, all I need is for it to record the max users per hour per license type, overwriting when there is a new winner.
But when I made this, I had no idea what the data would look like. And as it turns out, when it grabs the license data, it sometimes jumbles the order of them. So I made the BAQ to decode it all.
The one oddity here is that I apparently pass in a GUID at the start. I built this off of a trace of the button in Company Config Tracker, so I guess it need that.
Jason,
I finally got some time to devote to recreating your Epicor Function and BAQ in my Epicor database. Learned we only use 4 types of licensing so had to tweak it to cover that and had to also tweak it to use the UD100 table. Thanks so much for sharing all of this. I can see it will be a big help.
