No one here wants to see Epicor fail. But we can’t ignore the past. Hopefully the future is better.
True, but they all affected us customers the same; Epicor was down. It’s really hard for me to advocate for Epicor to our Executives and fellow employees here right now. They don’t see the distinctions as it’s all just “Epicor is down” to them and it has occurred too many times in recent memory for them to feel that This-time-will-be-different.
As @Banderson and @chaddb said, we’ve built our careers on this and no one wants to see this fail. Whatever you can do to make this CI/CD transition as smooth as possible and to live up to the “No breaking changes” promise will help rebuild the trust.
doesnt matter
We’re on-prem, and evaluate migrating to cloud every few years to see if it’s finally worth it for us. Our upgrade cadence is once a year in the middle of February, during our slow month. End of year has passed, finance has done their thing, January month end is done, and February month end isn’t here yet. Manufacturing has their jobs caught up, and the spring farm buying season hasn’t yet started (or the summer, or the fall, or the year-end). Our annual upgrade has 7 department managers doing about 10-20 hours of testing to make sure that any issues are identified so IT can fix them or we can figure out work-arounds.
Not being able to defer an upgrade to our chosen weekend in February is a show-stopper, preventing us from choosing to migrate to cloud.
Background - We did a dot release upgrade once without fully testing everything to fix some bug, and got burned when counter sales broke completely for an entire week. Management has said “Never again”, so going to monthly releases would generate hundreds of hours of additional testing for us. All this extra work would not justify the small improvement from some new feature, vs postponing it to once a year.
Everyone isn’t the same, but that’s how it would impact us.
Andris, I feel the same.
Did you review the CI/CD webinar, I need to watch it to see if there’s any possibility of being able to take an update yearly.
I watched it, but there wasn’t an annual option. AFAIK, you can defer up to 2 months if you purchased the flex option. My CAM asked me to bring this up to the cloud folks at Insights, so we’ll see!
One other thing mentioning would be if we did risk upgrading monthly and there was a bug found after going LIVE, would Epicor fix it immediately, or would I be waiting months or a year until the next big upgrade? Lots of PRB’s take months to trickle through the process. With our annual on-prem upgrades, at least it’s the devil we know.
once we load the monthly upgrade into the Cloud Management Portal, you have 2 months to upgrade pilot/production on your own cadence. So, yes, you can take it early.
And this is precisely my problem with SaaS. The cadence isn’t ours it’s the vendor’s. We’re allocating IT time and getting business disruption to validate changes we didn’t ask for and don’t benefit from, beyond making sure nothing the vendor changed has broken what already worked. That’s pure waste in any sense of the word.
Kinetic is an ERP system it’s not an iPhone app. It’s a strategic system of record and its stability matters more than novelty. New features can take years to assess, configure, etc then roll out properly. The idea that we should be in lockstep with a fortnightly, quarterly or even annual release train fundamentally misreads what ERP is to a manufacturing business.
Purchase Enterprise cloud.
Again, I’ll advocate here for the two paths.
For the small business who came from an ERP system called Excel, Kinetic IS like an iPhone app. They are just beginning the journey. 2-month upgrade is not odd.
When you are more established, spring for Enterprise and do yearly upgrades.
Tim answered what I think Utah meant, maybe? “Early” not “yearly”?
No I think Utah wants one update a year.
Well, yes, but I just assumed with the upgrade in March and Andris talking about Jan/Feb, that he also wanted to take it early… and yearly.
Also, I don’t think I ever noticed those words are only one letter apart.
I’d push back on this. An ERP system that is like an iPhone app is a small ERP system with no ability to modify and little expectation to have an Service Orientated Architecture and Kinetic isn’t pitched there. It’s an upper mid-market product aimed at the larger SME, where the system is heavily integrated, customised, and underpinning operations that don’t tolerate vendor-driven churn.
And, just throwing it out here. Have an “on prem” or “self service” option so we can paddle out own boat, so to speak, instead of just charging us more for what we already have? Docker has effectively solved the distribution problem; it’s almost as though it were designed for exactly this.
TBH, as I said in another thread today, I can’t tell what they are marketing.
I your thread earlier and i’m with you. Sounds like the AI used was set to max marketing. 
Beating a dead horse.
No offense meant to any of the Epicor peeps here, but this is a marketing and business decision.
They want that sweet SaaS money. They are betting that the money lost from on-prem will be offset and increased by moving whoever they can to a subscription model.
They are probably right.
The people who work for Epicor may care, but Epicor the monolith doesn’t, nor do their investors.
How this plays out in the long run, with the myriad of problems Epicor needs to overcome to become a world class SaaS provider is up in the air. I’m not happy, but most of the employees that I’m familiar with are doing their best to steer it as best they can. It’s sad to see them have to speak double and out of the sides of their mouth sometimes though. Rock and hard place I guess.
Yes and yes, I didn’t see that he read “early” instead of “yearly”.
Epicor won’t sell it to you without at least 150 seats.
