@askulte
Out of curiousity? How many PartBin Records do you have and what was your hardware spec before you upgraded?
That might be depending what CSF you are licensed for or if you are using one at all. The Australian ones do show āGSTā, this was pretty much the main reason for the Australian CSF, as well as the Taxbox report.
And that went down like a lead balloonā¦
Is that an Aussie saying? Specifically the ādownā part. Iām more used to hearing, āwent over like a lead balloonā
P.S. - sorry about the board meeting
Maybe itās just a Southern Hemiphere thing 
Not unusual @Hally. The age of most management teams and board members leads to thinking of previous experiences. Sorry it went down like a ā¦
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or perhaps a down under thing
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First off I am not questioning that upgrading and staying current is the right thing to do
You could come at this from another perspective and ask the business what their goals are for the next 3-5 years and what obstacles they see and how an upgrade to Epicor and any new functionality therein will help to achieve them- playing devils advocate it may be that spending time, money and effort on a system mod that fixes a major functionality gap will deliver more tangible results.
Quite a lot of good advice but very subjective benefits being touted here - for example how often do you actually call support, what kind of issues do you call them for and do you actually have performance issues. Focusing on performance could that be addressed by a lan upgrade and putting SSDās in the server - disrupts IT not the whole business. The eye and ear shutters will go down if you try and support an update to finance folks that the development tools are better and have easier access to APIās.
Things like MRP being faster are only important if that is a system bottleneck or it is not ready when required or it canāt be run looking for enough ahead - if it runs between midnight and six and is ready for folks in the morning, if that is reduced to 3 hours what is the tangible benefit to the org.
I think @Mark_Wonsil actually gives the most meaningful response, and I hate to use this buzz word, about using ERP as a disruptive technology to break down paradigms, but it has to be caveated that it is only a benefit if the business actually wants to use it - our org is a traditional manufacturing business and folks want similar reports that they got elsewhere in the 1980ās. I have wasted a lot of time creating dashboards as requested in power bi that nobody uses. If they donāt have the need it is just busy work.
Is it just me that is slightly disappointed that a very good question has had no killer answer - an upgrade helped us reduce a cumulative x from order processing times, or using the out the box dashboards in this version to highlight issues real time enabled us to deliver a 5% increase in OTIF delivery performance.
I think that is the kind of response that Rickās management team are looking for.
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Interesting viewpoint, which is useful to me at least. Weāre in an almost opposite situation here where senior management tend to have fear-of-missing-out and therefore donāt need much persuasion re upgrades. I can totally see that many businesses would be different and Iām glad you pushed that point.
We DID go from 10.1.400 to 10.2.200, and the killer thing for us was that complaints about system speed (particularly printing) went from sometimes dozens a day to none at all. We did move to a new server system and VM set-up at the same time, though, so I canāt offer that as a definite win for the upgrade alone, and therefore didnāt jump in with our experience.
We also needed REST capabilities because of a need to integrate Epicor with other specialised systems, and weāll be looking hard at 10.2.400 because the new automated order entry might be a massive efficiency gain for us.
Overall I concur, though - if youāre having to look for excuses to upgrade then upgrading might not be the best thing. I doubt system speed from an update alone would ever be big enough to be noticeable to senior management, and Epicor support in itself is probably not enough to justify the pain of weeks of upgrade disruption.
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Interestingly enough, my main impetus for staying current is security and compliance. New features are just a bonus. Governments are changing reporting requirements (ASC 606/IFRS 15), Taxes (UKās Making Tax Digital), privacy legislation, and constant security concerns with both Epicor and the Microsoft stack beneath it. Do I think Epicor would provide security patches for older versions? I do. However, users on the latest versions will be updated first. The new API-Keys feature of 10.2.400 will give far more control over access to the Epicor database and a must, IMHO, for anyone exposing their system to the cloud. (Like us Cloud users!) For me, staying current is primarily a risk management strategy. New features outside of security and compliance are just icing on the cake.
Mark W.
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Again interesting, and I donāt disagree with any of that. But I guess it shows how different companies are from each other.
I suspect that if management arenāt already interested in security, data risks and compliance, however much they should be, then bringing those things up wonāt change their minds. If theyāve asked for RoI-type reasons for an upgrade then I might begin to think that only some unfeasibly big step change is going to change their negative stance, and as an employee I might have better things to focus on. Of course, if Iām formally responsible for security and compliance then I might take the nuclear option of making upgrades a condition of me holding the role.
Personally, Iād want to stay as current as I could for many reasons, and I could probably have phrased my earlier comment better. I was just glad to be reminded that there are some companies where itās hard to lift the focus from just doing what has always been done, because I donāt know when I might find myself dealing with that situation, and that what seems to me to be obvious right now might not fit the bill then.
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