We are still fairly early on in our implementation process. We are a GovCloud user. I’m looking for the best resources to learn BAQ, SSRS, BPM, reports, and anything else that will be helpful during our implementation.
Welcome! You’ve come to a good place to start.
As dry and boring as the technical documentation is, I recommend reading through the ICE Tools Users Guide, the Customization Users Guide, and the Application Users Guide. All of these are available through your EpicWeb portal.
I found that even if you don’t fully understand everything you are reading, it helps to have gone through it. Many users here will assume you have read through these and know how to access them for future reference.
I recommend taking things slowly at first. Get a good handle on the terminology, and how epicor works. Then start with the easy stuff first.
One of the most helpful features for a newbie are the field details for each form. In any form in Epicor, go to Help > Field Help. This will open a side panel on the left. At the bottom click Technical Details, then click the thumbtack icon in the top right corner of the panel. This will lock the technical details open and give you very helpful field/table information for any fields you need.
For example if you open the Order Entry form (Sales Order Entry), and view the field help technical details, you can see the table and field name for each of the fields on the form. If you click on the field called PO in the Header section of the order form, you can see that the PO field is populated from the OrderHed table, and the name of the field is PONum. You can use this information to help fine tune your BAQs.
Now that you know how to identify the various fields and tables you might be interested in, start making your first BAQ. Try our various tables, joins, and filter criteria. This will give you a good idea of how the BAQs work. Another helpful feature within the BAQ designer is the table/field information. In your BAQ designer, start a new BAQ, and go to the Query builder tab. Now search for and click on any table from the list on the left side. On the right side you will see a list of all the fields in the table (with a field description), as well as some table information at the top. This table information can be helpful when determining which tables are grouped together. Like the OrderHed, OrderDtl, and OrderRel tables.
Once you have a handle on how BAQs, tables, and fields work, then you should dive into the more complicated topics like SSRS reports, BPMs, Updatable BAQs, and Customizable dashboards.
Honestly there are not a lot of great resources on the web besides this site. A few users have some helpful code snippets floating around GitHub, but I find all my best answers and advice comes from this site.
If you have any specific questions, come on back here and give a shout!
Good luck!
Nate
2 Likes
Thank you!
I have downloaded those user guides, but have not thoroughly read them yet. I looked in the Epicor Learning center, but there did not seem to be many on demand classes available. I tried “Creating BAQ Reports” and got stuck when it says to go to Actions->Design SSRS Report in BAQ Report Designer. I do not have that option.
Then I looked at ICE Tools User Guide and it says the following. I am our company administrator and don’t know what they are talking about. I think some of that is maybe software that I haven’t been told we need to install. I did reach out to our consultant asking these same questions, but have not received a response yet.
You must have access to the SSRS Reporting Services
Configuration Manager, Report Manager, and Report
Builder for your SQL Server report server. Your access to these
tools must include sufficient user role assignments to create
folders and save report files on the report server.
Your administrator can set user role assignments on the Report
Manager Folder Settings page. We recommend that your
user account have all the roles selected. This includes Browser,
Content Manager, My Reports, Publisher, and Report
Builder.
Ensure security for the root Reports folder is inherited from
Parent Security or is otherwise appropriately defined to allow
user access.
What I was trying to accomplish, and I thought it should be relatively easy since the data is all there, is to show our inventory UOM and quantity on the Supplier RFQ’s and on the RFQ Entry screen. The supplier’s invoice is for pounds so we have the purchase UOM equal to pounds. We inventory and purchase in feet, so a normal PO would be for 12’ of xxx material. I just thought I could add those fields to the RFQ report and the RFQ Entry screen in Epicor, but I’m finding it more challenging than I thought it would be.
You want to check your permissions in User Account Security Maintenance. Pull up your username, and verify that all the applicable settings are checked off in the Options tab.
As far as your follow-up question, it might be worth starting a more specific thread asking that question.
Thank you. I verified that I have every check box checked on the Options for User Account Maintenance. I wondered if it had something to do with being in a cloud environment (GovCloud specifically).
Thank you also for the separate thread suggestion. I can do that, I just thought that showed me that I really need to try to learn and better understand how it all works. It seems to me like the videos on the Epicor Learning Center would be a great way to teach that.