I know there are lots of different automation solutions out, including Epicor Automation Studio but most of them are cost prohibitive for enterprises in countries where usd carries a heavy weight (i’m from Dominican Republic)
We are thinking in trying to automate some flows but using Microsoft Power Automate as its licenses are not that pricey.
What we would like to do are stuff like if you have a new PO to approve get an email notification or even be able to approve it or deny it through a button on said email.
Has anyone tried some of these functionalities in platforms that does not cost 10kusd a year? xd
Don’t have this built but it depends on a few things: Are you on-prem? Where’s your email service? Where’s your Kinetic? etc.
One way to reduce cost is to use consumption-based cloud services like Azure Functions or Logic Apps. (Logic apps is the application that Power Automate is built on.) For each trigger in Logic Apps, the consumption plan is $0.000025/call with the first 4,000 actions free. If you write a Connector to reach into Kinetic, each call is about $0.001. Azure Functions are charged by call, network egress, and any storage you may use, but again, very affordable because you only pay for what you use.
Like Jose said, you just need to write your REST calls and figure out the networking back to your Kinetic instance wherever that may be.
The azure functions are cool. And I think they can be stateless or should be haha, been a minute since I brushed up on this. I thought though that they had two types.
And for homies who REALLY want to stay on-prem and don’t mind running their own Kubernetes cluster, then you can run Functions and Logic Apps in an Azure Arc managed cluster.
Yep! However Power Automate in particular I’ve barely touched due to how much of a pain it is to keep track of in git.
There’s nothing really special about working with the Kinetic API. Making HTTP requests and parsing JSON are the minimum requirements. Which means that pretty much anything can be Epicor Automation Studio if you use it wrong enough!
Gotta love this communuty, discussions always seem to explode with ideas so fast =D
@Mark_Wonsil we are on prem and use email service from our hosting based on cpanel. (standard smpt configuration)
Understanding REST in Epicor shouldnt be an issue as we’ve integrated some on our processes (sales orders, misc issue material, inventory transfer) but is more the logic of the trigger that activates the flow into those services.
I think we could think of a BPM that calls via REST the function when a PO is created and then the email is sent but i think it’d be better to have some kind of service monitoring ie the POhed table in order to send said email.
or should be haha, been a minute since I brushed up on this. I thought though that they had two types.