I’m still waiting for a SOW from Epicor on our upgrade to Kinetic cloud, but I’m getting questioned internally on how long that whole process is going to take.
Does anyone have some insight on what their timeframe was going from 10.2.700 on prem to Kinetic Cloud?
We only have 8 customized screens (Some are duplicates since they are tracker views) and I’ve been able to re-create those in a 2024.2 test environment in Application Studio. We have a handful of BPM’s but most are just audit logs and the others are just enabling a check box at record creation so they aren’t complicated. We have 56 Dashboards that need to be uplifted (I’m struggling on those right now) those are supposed to be quoted in the SOW so we’ll see what they want to charge for that work. And lastly we have about 35-40 customized reports, but I was told if they are SSRS they should be fine and come forward.
Keep these things in mind, we have very limited computer savvy people and they have only been exposed to Classic Epicor screens. No one has been exposed to Kinetic at all. I’m also the only IT professional here, we do not have any subject matter experts and they are thinking I can show everyone how to use Kinetic. I do not know the quote to cash process since I am a networking professional, not a accountant or production individual.
I’m trying to figure out how long we should be really expecting this to take because they also want to implement MRP and Scheduling and upper management thinks we can do all of this at once.
I gave a timeline that puts us up on Kinetic (no MRP or Scheduling changes) before the end of the year and hopefully the end of the year will mark our Stability test in that environment doing things the way we do them now. Is that over estimating? or is that a good schedule to minimize internal impact to standard work.
We upgraded from 10.2.4 to Multi-Tenant SaaS On Cadence in ~10 months, so your end of year deadline doesn’t sound too out of line.
For reference we have ~200 seats and I am the only ‘Epicor Guy’ in my company. We have one internal IT guy and a 3rd party IT company. Our PM from Epicor was excellent.
I’d agree with @hackaphreaka, it sounds like you are pretty tightened up there, only 8 customizations is nice. The dashboards, I have heard, are a “dragon”, so that may be your biggest uplift in terms of time spent. SSRS customizations shouldn’t be too bad, depending on how much the base RDD has changed. You may have to re-do some of them, but I doubt all of them, especially if the majority of them are custom, based off a BAQ.
You’ll be fine with the Kinetic screens. If you don’t have the epicor learning center license, you can ask for a quote, but I would say that their classes and content there can save you a ton of time as you can direct people to go there and take the “getting started in kinetic” classes.
I would say 10-12 months is feasible, you could probably go faster if you can outsource/work through the custom stuff you mentioned in a few months and get user acceptance testing done in a month or two.
We have 32 seats and 21 DC’s for licensing. However we have 60 unique Epicor Users and just over 100 PC’s in our environment. I wish we had a “Epicor Guy” but they think that’s me, in addition to being the only IT guy. I wish we had a 3rd party IT company for support but we do not at this time.
I’ve been told that ELC is included in Kinetic Cloud so I theoretically will have that available to me.
I’m trying to find a video or walk through on how to create a basic dashboard in Application studio that has a date filter on it, and I’m struggling with that. If I take an already designed Classic one that is a grid view on the bottom and a tracker view at the top with a date range setup, or just single date filter and I “preview” that as an application, the Tracker portion comes up as a slide out for the date, but even after entering a date if I close that window and refresh the grid display it ignores and actually clears out the date that was selected.
I want to duplicate something like this and I’m struggling. Granted I’m only able to work in 2024.2 right now since we don’t have a current cloud environment setup or the ability to run the latest 2025 on-prem version.
As part of the project SOW you signed with Epicor, I believe there are hours in there to help with this stuff, right? I think you could ask your CAM. If you get like 1-2 hours on converting a few dashboards it may help spur you along.
From what I understand, the dashboards are going to be your biggest time-suck.
I was looking at that yesterday but the link to the downloads is not valid anymore. Only other item I saw in that post was the link to this topic. I need to run through this when no one is bothering me to see what I get out of it…
Have not signed an SOW at this time. I’m still waiting for that, which is why I think it’s not fair to be asking me for a timeline when I don’t even know the scope of work that needs to be done.
Keep in mind that if you have SSRS reports that arent using a report style (using direct SQL or a stored Proc and deployed to the report server) those are not allowed in the cloud and will need to be converted to a BAQ.
We aren’t using anything that special/advanced… Thankfully.
All of our SSRS reports are either using the base Report Styles, or there are a couple that I have brought in a new field and modified that base style.
I would lean on your CAM again here @FTI-SeniorAdmin. Have them help you answer that question with you. They can run an analyzer, or have someone hop on and review these with you and give an opinion on this.
That’s a good start. Sometimes they modify the base RDD and add a field or two, and all the RDL logic can stay the same, other times it’s changed enough that you have to re-do it.
It looks like our marketing team has overwritten the page. I have asked them to restore it. Using our dashboard template is an easy way to get dashboards up and running quickly. When we migrated from Classic to Kinetic (on-prem), the most difficult and time consuming part, by far, was the dashboards.
My Cam hasn’t been that helpful in this process. More often than not he’s responded to my questions with something along the lines of “That’s something that your team will have to decide and implement”
That was how he answered my questions that I had regarding securing logins, and if it will sync or work with O365 Entra free… and so on. I’ve been left with figuring this stuff out on my own with no support unless we have a third party IT company to consult on it.
I was sent a PDF file showing how to add a connector from Epicor to Entra, but when I asked if this requires a paid subscription to Azure AD I got no response. One of the PDF’s states this.
This process assumes Microsoft Entra ID (Azure Active Directory) identity service has been purchased by your company.
Just a thought, do you have an EUG regional group near you? I have found our Eastern PA one very helpful with getting advice / thoughts from other users. We have meetings every 2-3 months (thank you Doug Oswald!). Our CAMS frequently attend also, and it’s good to meet them in person IMO. If you don’t have one nearby you might want to consider driving to another area for it or attend one of the remote ones. It’s nice that it is based on users helping users, like this group here, but another option. Home - Epicor Users Group
I’m sorry about that, you should ask who their manager is, who the regional manager is and get them involved and explain to them that you need help and you’re not getting enough of it from your CAM.
We completed our cloud migration in about 6 months, most of that time was building a new ECC site. Integrations in general added to the timeline.
Our end users had very little change introduced, stayed on smart client and minimized the changes we introduced for the migration. No report, dashboard, customization changes were included.
We did extensive testing and the actual cut over was smooth.
We had some challenges around SSRS reports being available in all companies, made a UBAQ to fix that.
Nice @bderuvo, that’s what I was saying @FTI-SeniorAdmin, you can see that 6 months is achievable without a doubt. @bderuvo is also an expert on this subject matter and might be able to help you figure out a way to assess the totality of this upgrade without you having to do the work to figure out if every dashboard can be converted, every SSRS report is going to work, idk. He might be able to offer a different way to get the answer you’re trying to get about how to estimate this timeline.
I used to attend the EUG’s that Comtec hosted in the CT/Mass area and those have fallen off since the Covid era… I have attended a few of their new webinars when I’ve had the time to, but my biggest issue is getting others involved. I can’t seem to get anyone to go with me, or even be slightly interested in learning how our system works.
Yes I know that’s an internal issue and I hope this upgrade and the Presidents desire to implement MRP and Scheduling fully, will exaggerate the fact that we need subject matter experts and we don’t have them.
Holy Biscuits… @tpogue I’ve been working on the Dashboard Template instructions for about 2hrs… But so far on this simple dashboard I’ve been successful.
Lets gooooooooo! Nice work! Also, thank you @tpogue and @mbayley for sharing your tips and tricks for all of us on the forum. The magic of this forum is always amazing.
