Good reason to upgrade from 10.1.600 to 10.2.300 or whatever is the latest version

My company is currently on E10.1.600. We will go on to sustaining support next month but the management here is balking at another upgrade effort. We have a lot of users (400+), hundreds of custom reports and dashboards, and the upgrade effort to test and verify the newest version of E10 would involve 20-25 people, 3-4 hours per week for about 10 weeks, based on our last two upgrades, a cost to our business of nearly 1000 man hours. Management asks, “What do we gain from this?”

There are new features that have been added to E10.2, but has anything in the “nuts and bolts” of the system been changed or improved? Are there any new productivity improvements in Sales, Project Management, Production Management, Finance, Shipping/Receiving etc. that would justify such a large investment? I have asked our Epicor CAM for this info, but all we get is the marketing stuff that is lacking in details.

Has anyone made the move from 10.1.600, or any 10.1 version up to 10.2 and seen any measurable gains? I really need some help to convince the management here to make the jump. Thanks again for the help, and I look forward to your responses.

This is such a wide open question that will ultimately end in any number of responses. I’ll take a first crack at it…

  • Starting with Support - which will end shortly, as you know.
  • Core has not changed that much, unless you use some features like REST that have now all been turned on by default.
  • Industry Extensions and CSFs are all now ‘baked in’ with extensive support for CSF functionality.
  • Active Home Page, EDD, Web Configurator…
  • Lightweight MES client, new job scheduling board (10.2.400)
  • Performance is better and they are constantly working on it.
  • Tax engine - added features for line level taxes on QUotes, orders and POs.
  • And lot’s more features, fixes and new mobile apps…

See this post - Whats New In Epicor 10.2.400 - ERP 10 - Epicor User Help Forum
And find the ‘delta’ docs on the education site - they have a lot of info. Personally, I would bite the bullet. Testing is going to be your man hours, but almost everything comes up from 10.1.500 (where I was) to 10.2.300 (where I am) without any intervention at all. uBAQs need to be touched as do their related Dashboards… and a few other things… but it’s definitely not a full cycle like from E9 to E10.

Or think about moving to the cloud and letting Epicor keep you current from here on out…

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One thing most people don’t think about, but I am sure Epicor has their brightest moved to support the latest version. So if you want @aidacra chances are you will get him on vLatest instead of E9 or 10.1.500/600 :slight_smile:

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Are your reports SSRS or Crystal? Are your customizations .NET? What version were you on before upgrading to 10.1.600?

1.)Epicor Support is the biggest one. I think the older versions that you can only log calls on the Epiccare site and your response time (and knowledgeable responses) will not be as good as being on a 10.2 version. Epicor resources will be devoted more on the newer releases. For example, some reps will have no idea about the Industry Extension products since now those have been incorporated into the “core” product.

2.) There were performance improvement(s) going from 10.1 to 10.2.x.

3.) EDD and Office 365 integration to retrieve data directly into Excel may eliminate a lot of your redundant reports.

4.) At some point, your organization will HAVE to upgrade. Hopefully, your business is growing and having additional functionality (such as mobile apps) will increase productivity.

5.) The Cloud. Everything is moving in that direction and reduced IT operational costs could justify the “pain” you put into the newer version upgrade.

“If you wait for the right time, the time will never be right”

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One word…PERFORMANCE!

OH…and REST :smiley:

If you get too far behind it will just get harder. If you keep up to date regularly, it wont be so much work up front.
Check out the Epicor ATE tool. It helps automate testing.

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Thanks for the replies. We have Crystal and SSRS reports, 70% Crystal, 30% SSRS, about 275 in total.
We upgraded first from Vantage to E10.0.700 (a total nightmare!) and then from 10.0.700 to 10.1.600, (only marginally easier).

Hey Rick,

Another question to ask: “Is there a way we can be more efficient as a company with our ERP system?” In the past, we’ve made these “Pets” of our ERP systems. We’ve created hundreds of reports (which nobody uses or forgets why they were written or the person who asked for them is gone or…) and we’ve locked in a certain process which prevents our company from adapting to new realities. So one of the biggest improvements to staying current isn’t in the software but your enterprise. Companies are moving away from reports (a nice 70s technology) and moving towards things like Epicor Data Discovery - which is basically dashboards on steroids. This reduces reporting requirements for IT and empowers the users.

I get it. Management, hell - everybody, wants stability and dislikes change. But our business environments are changing faster and faster. Planting a flag on a particular version of software feels like the right thing but the longer we put it off, the harder it is to adapt - as you’ve seen. The more often you do something, the better you get because you really are challenged to remove the wasteful methods or at least reduce the time to do so.

We’ve gone from 10.0.700 to 10.2.100 to 10.2.200 to 10.2.300 in the last 18 months. This has gone remarkable well. First, the changes are smaller so the effort is smaller. Second, people are used to testing and test better than they do when they do it every 3 years.

Reducing unnecessary modifications or making smarter alterations to the software not only saves time but gives you the ability to save money too. Management is getting tired of spending thousands of dollars on hardware upgrades. “Didn’t we just buy you new servers ten years ago?!” :neutral_face: Staying current allows you to easily move to a private or public cloud if/when the costs work for you.

But most importantly, staying current (not just jumping to the latest version and sitting there) frees up some imagination to let us control our processes and not let our system built on aging assumptions hold us back. At least for us, sitting on an old version? #NotToday.

Mark W.

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@DavisStd1 - Perhaps @Mark_Wonsil can also talk about automated testing. This may alleviate a LOT of your testing phase by checking BAQs and such…

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One little point - I think upgrades have been getting easier. I couldn’t say that 10.1 to 10.2 will be painless, but from there on it is likely to be less and less work.

For us, even going from 10.1.400 to 10.2.200, the things that caused the most headaches were ones that had been changed between 10.1.400 and 10.1.600.

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Same here. Moving from 10.0.700.4 to 10.2.100 was the toughest but we also had no Crystal reports and only forms for SSRS reports. We were never on 10.1 but like @dhewi, changes there is what surprised us the most.

I think the idea of support for a version being transitioned to “Sustaining” is often overblown in the effect on the users of that version.

I’m not suggesting that one shouldn’t update if they can. But rather that you make sure you’re ready to update, over thinking “We’ve got to update by May 15th!!!”.

I just opened a case for 10.1.400.23 yesterday, and had it resolved within a few hours. And 10.1.400 & .500, went into “Sustaining support” back on 1/1/2019.

Sustaining support is sufficient for most issues. You’re most common risk would be that your issue gets a reply of, “This is a known issue and was fixed in 10.2.200. We suggest you update.”

So again, you’re better off being in the “Sustaining support” phase for while, over rushing an update just to be able to say that your current support is “active”.

Edit

I did get “This is a known issue and was fixed in…” for my issue that I opened yesterday. But I guess I was lucky enough that a fix for my version was created before it went to sustaining.

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Thanks again. Many of you have mentioned performance gains. Where have you seen this? MRP run times, Invoice generation, Mass Printing of Purchase Orders, things like that, or general “behind the scenes” stuff in SQL?

Taking that to our board meeting today…Thanks @Mark_Wonsil

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Rick - Do you have the resources to spin up a test environment with enough horsepower to run the larger processes? You could see for yourself. When we upgraded from 10.0 to 10.2.300 (in January), we did see a lot of improvements (some processes now take 10 minutes instead of 4 hours like Refresh PartBin/Alloc).

At the same time, we also upgraded to a shiny new server and newer versions of the server OS and SQL, which is arguably more secure and has performance improvements as well.

For us the main reason is MRP and Finance which have its problems and those problems are actively being addressed on 10.2.

Also Reports have fixes, for example Sales Order Acknowledgement in 10.2 now includes the Tax in the Total, well when we sell a 1 million $ item and tax it 10K and then send the Customer a SO Acknowledgement without the Tax (in 10.1.500 it didnt SUM it in), they will be surprised when they get the invoice which will be a discrepancy vs the SO Ack. For us a SO Ack is a Legal Contract.

PS: The Tax is also missing on PO Report and Quote Form

10.1 vs 10.2

Also 10.2 runs on Entity Framework 6 while 10.1 is on EF4, funny thing I just sent this Email out this morning:

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@ERPSysAdmin PS: The Tax is also missing on PO Report and Quote Form in < 10.2 - Many Companies are leaving Money on the table and not realizing it, its not easy to spot :slight_smile:

POForm 10.1.500 vs 10.2.300.13

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This is all good to know since we are in a similar situation. Thanks for sharing!

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Yes, thanks to everyone for the comments and suggestions!

Yes, we do have a good test environment, but it runs on a virtual server. We will definitely run a number of processes and review the results against the 10.1.600 benchmark.