I can definitely see outage experience adjusting your opinion of the solution… And I have expressed that concern to management so they are aware of the possibility. So if they want to stay on-prem to avoid that scenario then we are looking at a server cost next year, and also having to hire Epicor to help us get to at least 2024.1 or 2024.2 and provide training for that upgrade.
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They will make it lower to lure you in, and then keep jacking it up year after year. Getting into SaaS is easy, getting out? Not so much.
There are other people who can host you besides Epicor if you really need to get it off your plate, make sure they are under consideration as well.
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Right now moving to SaaS is NOT cheaper than staying on-prem, not at all… it’s a 47% increase over the on-prem current maintenance cost.
They’re not looking to just move the hosting elsewhere, its more of a complaint that they aren’t seeing the return on the investment, and unfortunately that may be largely due to us not being able to stay current, OR fully utilizing the system. << The latter honestly requires some sort of education module so I hope someday to convince them of that.
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There’s no way I’d ever consider going to Epicor Cloud. You loose all control once you move to cloud. You live by Epicor’s upgrade schedule. And you’re at the mercy of their cloud team. Look at some of the cloud posts on here. They don’t know how to run their own cloud. @aosemwengie1 hasn’t been able to run reports in weeks.
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I wouldn’t stay on 10.2 either. Your company needs to get into at least every-other-year upgrade to maintain on a supported version. Otherwise upgrades are even a bigger PITA as so much has changed.
I started with Vantage 8.0 SQL so I feel you on upgrade pain with, “What did they break now?!” on upgrades. Also when the powers-that-be aren’t willing to invest in keeping Epicor updated on any kind of regular cadence it makes your job all the harder.
That’s one kind of a positive of SaaS as you are forced into a upgrade cadence. It’s a brute force way of changing the company culture but 
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I thought all SaaS customers get access to Epicor Learning Center… I’d ask your CAM about that. It’s just base Epicor but at least it’s educational/training materials to start from plus as you’re not too customized it should pretty well match your system.
That was one of the drivers for us. In past years and past systems, we shunned upgrades in an effort to stay stable…but by doing so, we lost out on features presented in upgrades. It’s a double-edged sword.
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This may not be a bad thing.
“Some” not all of the cloud posts. I understand it has it’s cons, but so does on-prem. Every scenario has it’s negatives and to think that having all the control is the best way may not be true for a company that has no drivers to put in front of those controls.
I have trouble believing that either scenario is 100% terrible, or 100% great… I want to hear about the main things that have happened to users on the cloud so I can build a pros and cons layout.
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I just got confirmation that ELC is included in the Cloud Package.
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This is basically how we are living right now. 10.2 is quick and stable for what we use it for… however… that doesn’t last forever, and we are missing out on the improvements.
Ehh. Personal opinion there. I can’t think of any cons on our on-prem deployment.
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It sounds like your management staff has solid interest and invests in your IT department to maintain and keep your system current. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have that.
Same here for every company I’ve worked for. We’re now SaaS here, but that upgrade, was mid-way completed when I started. If you have the staff --and capacity to self host and stay on an upgrade cadence-- I don’t see that SaaS would really give you anything unless you’re looking to off-load the DB administration.
Correct there are Pros and Cons to both. SaaS cloud isn’t bad for us and while we’ve had some issues it’s not really at a higher level than we seen when we were on-prem. We’ve not experienced issues as other SaaS users here have with data-loss or continued reports issues.
Don’t have a large IT staff, don’t have the capacity to self-host (we were 3rd party onprem and that contract was expiring).
We’re hoping the upgrade cadence works out well for us. It’s a definite culture shift. It will impose discipline on us to do proper testing of each upgrade in Pilot twice a year.
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We have a Epicor “Core Team” of SMEs or Managers from each department who meeting regularly and are the spearhead for upgrade User Acceptance Testing (UAT) in Pilot and on-hand at Production go-live. We should do two rounds of UAT in Pilot if possible but usually one is enough and just need to spot-test the issues found.
We had each department via a template, document their processes in Work Instructions that are used for UATs
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There is a element of probability to this choice besides a static list of pro’s and cons. Some people have had much worse experiences on saas than others. One thing I find telling is that people who do have major issues have to fight, and often times do not get any compensation when they (epicor) fail to meet uptime or service level ‘agreements’.
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Anyone using Epicor ReCoder to automate some of this testing?
Sounds like something we’ll need to implement going forward. What we can’t have is IT doing the entire testing process…IT isn’t doing the work day-to-day that would know for better or for worse if it’s working properly.
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