My very first post on this Forum! pleased to meet you all!
Right now we are in the process of upgrading our Epicor10 implementation (10.2.400) to Epicor Kinetic (2022.1)! We built the testing ambient and should be doing a final migration on April next year! Kudos to that!
We are looking forward to implement several sales channels (Ecommer site, Sales App, B2B, etc) and wanted to know your experience on integrating and syncing data with several online channels and apps, for example syncing warehouse inventory, sales order, quotations, etc…
Thanks for the recommendation! We looked at the commerce solution but seemed a little bit rigid and not so customizable but it may be just a misunderstanding.
Regarding the Automaion Studio, do you know where i could get a more technical data? Seems like a service like twilio or Zapier for integration with several CRMS, Social Networks ETC and not something that can be customized for implementing mobile applications, webapps, e-commerce stores, etc…
It’s an integrated version of Workato, that’s the service you would want to look at. When I say integrated I mean from a UX experience but otherwise it’s still just Workato branded with Epicor colors. You could literally make it do whatever you want between Automation studio and Epicor Functions I can’t think of anything that couldn’t be integrated
You are correct that Automation Studio is more an Integration Platform
If you are looking to write custom apps you are going to want to go with the REST interface or look at a product like Bezlio https://bezl.io/ (for mobile apps)
Epicor also has their own mobile apps EMWW and like @jgiese.wci the Magento Ecommerce Solution. There is also Part Trap (https://www.parttrap.com/) which I know has an Epicor integration, Sales Force for CRM Epicor has integration with them both via Automation Studio and in Kinetic Native
Really with Kinetic the possibilities are endless you have a fully supported end to end REST Interface, the entire platform is written on an Service Oriented Architecture so most functionality, field and button click can be reached with a service
If you have some more specific requirements we could give you more specific recommendations. I will say Automation Studio is a pretty great tool we are very glad to have gotten (more technical details can be found on this site, also @timshuwy is the Product Owner over there and willing to answer any and all questions you may have)
This slide from Insites is a very high level summary of all the things that Automation Studio can do. it can serve to AUTOMATE business activity, it can INTEGRATE systems to keep data synchronized, and it can process WORKFLOW for notifications, approvals, etc. Because it is based on Workato.com platform, you get access to 1000s of community CONNECTORS and 100,000’s of sample integration recipes. The one advantage of purchasing Automation Studio (Workato) through Epicor is that we have embedded it into our platform, which also makes the pricepoint come way down due to our agreement with Workato (vs you going straight to Workato). We also have built our connector into Kinetic which exposes the APIs so that you dont have to understand how to build complicated JSON records to do CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete).
it also has multiple ways to trigger a recipe to run including Data Triggers, Time based triggers, Webhooks, and you can even create your own callable API which is a special type of recipe.
Thank you very much for all the information and tips given, they’ve been great and right into what we are looking for.
I’ll get in touch with our Epicor Partner to get a Quote on Automation Studio which seems like the easier path in order to reduce time to market.
One thing that we are also tackling as an issue is that for example our warehouses track inventory in a specific UOM (Boxes that support 50 units i.e.), could we be able to process sales in units (1/50) with automatic conversion when substracting from the inventory?
Thanks again in advance for your valuable insight.
Inventory conversion like @josecgomez is talking about happens on receipt and shipment. Generally most companies would actually track the inventory in eaches. However, fairly recently, they add the ability to to track in multiple units of measure. I’m not very familiar with it, but I would imagine it will add some transactions to make the work properly (for example if you break up a box from a box to each, which box does it break out? etc.). But it’s possible to do that.
Of course! In the process of setting up the test environment we found many challenges as we proceeded to set up on new windows 2019 servers and then migrate the database. Mainly we found the following:
Migrating the database we found many issues running the conversion workbench as we have many customizations. We had to run it several times until no more exceptions were shown.
Installing the App Server we had some certificate issues as we pretended to use the same prod certificates but the hostnames were different on the dev machines. As Kinetic does not use anymore pure TCP sockets connections but http request this was a major point to address. We had to resolve to using same machine hostnames as the prod servers.
Right now we are starting to check customizations with the classic client and most seem non-functional so we are going to deal with them accordingly.
At the end of the process i’m willing to do a recap of the process and sort of a journal with all the hasles and whistles we encountered during the migration.
Thanks for the information, will look into it as we track inventory by boxes but we have a retail channel that sells by the units and so far we do the convertion from units to boxes (1/50) with a SQL job before sending the order to Epicor through the service connect.
I am in the process of preparing for an upgrade from Epicor 10.2 to Kinetic. I see by you posts that you have already been though the fir on this subject. I was wondering if you were able to do a recap of the process and create a journal with as you say, the hassles and whistles you encountered. I am trying to learn as much as I can before diving into this thing.
Could you point me to where I can access the journal if you have it written.
