Curious what others are using for reporting tools that are used to schedule and distribute reports?
We had been using PowerBI and Crystal with our prior ERP system and have been using Grow for a handful of end user reports so far.
So far, I’m not impressed. We have had a number of support tickets for problems with scheduled reports not working correctly, disconnection to Kinetic a couple times, and other random issues.
Grow is a simple tool compared to PowerBI, so it is ok for basic reports but very limited.
The best point for Grow (IMO) is the licensing – unlimited users to distribute reports to, where PowerBI is pricey if we provide to everyone.
We have been using BAQs to feed Grow, so in theory any reporting tool can ingest the data
Thinking maybe we need to consider another tool so want to see what others have positive experience with…
Our old-school team still loves Excel. Everyone knows how to use it, and pulling data in via Power Queries and APIs is pretty easy once you get it setup. I know it doesn’t like email out reports or anything, but for our needs its perfect. (and free!)
We wrote a program that generates PDFs from Crystal reports and sends them out. We have Excel (ODBC FTW \0/), PowerBI and sales-i for realtime interactive things. Grow reports I assume are aimed at A4 stationary type of reports IE sales orders etc.
See your Excel and raise you Access. We went with the read-only ODBC setup in the cloud so we could retain what we’d already built while on-prem. Took a lot of tweaks to get it to run consistently well…doesn’t play nicely with Access local tables/joins, often requires temp/interim tables (ODBC to local, then join local to local).
We still have some access databases :B Got them linked into the DB via openquery so we can proxy somethings as workaround to Vantage 8 issues. Luckily the number of these are dwindling.
How did you setup a RO odbc cloud setup? Is this self cloud hosted to an SQL instance?
Maybe these issues are not a problem for a smaller company, but for a larger one, this model does not scale.
Just look at Epicor Ideas Grow category. There are several long standing requests that are going ignored. Since we purchased the product 2 years ago, there has been no improvements to the product.
At the last insights their team mentioned there would be a new product “Grow Data Platform”. I haven’t heard a word about it since.
It’s an option that Epicor provides to cloud customers…for a cost. Likely tied to number of licenses/companies/sites. Don’t recall what ours was - but it was reasonable enough that we jumped on the opportunity.
What I wish Epicor would do is sell the professional services package for setting up a data warehouse on Epicor data for people who did not want to use EDA or GROW- which I really think are fine tools for a limited BI use case- they absolutely can deliver value right away. Understanding the semantic models is something they know well and could make money on sharing that knowledge and collaborating with customers to help them build a data warehouse that they feel fits their company, when that’s not EDA or GROW.
I wouldn’t go with it purely because it’s an ERP company trying to compete in a space that’s dominated by competitors going harder and throwing more money, research, and investment in it (i.e. Databricks, Fabric, snowflake, etc.). For a small company like you said, maybe GROW is the right solution, but I think that many larger companies with a much larger footprint will outGROW it because of the their need for more complex governance scenarios, growing needs for a data architecture that can be used to make AI models (and the ability to track/trace how those models were built), etc..
– Full disclosure - I work for a Vendor that sells a PowerBI solution –
PowerBI doesn’t always have to be pricey - if it’s hosted on the correct type of tenant then it can be shared with an unlimited numbers of users with no additional cost for viewers (only for users who need to develop reports).
Mark, ping me on my email as i’d be interested to learn about it. We currently use the PowerBI workspaces and a person has to have a license to view where any the data source is a “premiuim” (e.g. MySQL or web). If you have a solution around that, definately interested..
Chris CSouth@sixaxisllc.com
Power BI Premium offers dedicated capacity to a tenant, enabling advanced features, larger dataset sizes (25GB–400GB), paginated reports, and unlimited distribution to free users.
As we offer a hosted solution with the economies of scale that brings, we can extend these benefits to customers subscribing to our cost effective PowerBI offering.
I was considering making a comment about a platform’s community being part of what you’re buying into.
This forum, for example, is a valuable asset to Epicor and their users and should be considered in client cost and risk considerations. Microsoft clearly recognizes that and invests substantially in Power BI’s user community.
Anyway… I was going to suggest comparing a search for user groups for PBI and Grow and etc., but then this happened and it’s way too funny to not share.
We were on Epicor before Grow was bundled, so we’re coming at it late and trying to decide if it’s worth adding. One thing we do like about Grow is the simplicity for both end users and IT. It feels much easier to roll out and support than Power BI, which has a much steeper learning curve for users and techs.
Your point on security and scale is valid. We’re around 350 employees with ~70 concurrent users, and managing user access and report security in Grow feels like it could become a pain pretty quickly.
What really gives me pause is how little discussion there is about Grow here. Tools that work well or cause pain usually generate chatter. The lack of it doesn’t inspire much confidence.
We’re also looking at Power BI via BlueSky as an alternative. And with Epicor lately falling flat on their face with every update and change, I’m more hesitant than ever to go deeper into the ecosystem.
That’s my thing too, I know that I’m going to want to ingest much more data from more sources than ERP data and do more advanced things in the future with AI and pipelines, etc. so choosing GROW seems like I’ll reach the end of the rope sooner than with another tool. BUT at the same time like you said, it’s such a nice tool to roll out as-is, less learning curve, etc. so really taking a look at what your business truly needs may reveal that GROW is just fine for now, and for the next 5+ years.
To be honest, the data ingestion in Grow is actually pretty good. We are connecting with a variety of different sources with all of their own intricates. So far I have not run into anything I can’t do.
