I’m glad to see someone else understanding that IT does not have this day to day knowledge of the system.
I would love it if our core managers would take on these responsibilities and become a core team resource… However I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
That could be said for any software platform these days. Sadly…
Full Disclosure, I’m an Operations Consultant for an Epicor Partner. Before that, I was a one-man “utility infielder” IT guy who eventually became the on-man “IT and Epicor guy”.
The above are GREAT comments. But what stands out to me from your original post is that you aren’t using MRP and don’t seem to WANT (at the management level) to use MRP.
This is not an IT problem, and it does not have an IT solution. Whether you stay on prem or go to the cloud or change to a different ERP system entirely, the problem remains. What is needed to SOLVE the problem is management decision to invest the time and money into whatever ERP system you decide to use. It’s the elephant in the room, but it needs to be pointed out. If no (or only minimal) investment is to be made, we can keep applying bandages but the actual issue won’t be solved.
1000% agree… I hope that they realize this soon because I think it’s the biggest thing that is preventing them from seeing a return on their investment.
We were told cloud is going to a once per month upgrade schedule next year. Its already a tremendous burden to test our processes end to end twice a year, once a month is inconceivable.
We haven’t yet but I’d like too try it out. Just haven’t had the time with all the projects we’re doing right now to mess with it.
When I was in the cloud, we had monthly patches already. Are they saying that they will be adding functionality in these patches now?
agree with @Ernie in that there are some fundamental problems with using an enterprise system.
I have found in an on-prem world that we think we just upgrade on our own time, but honestly, we should have the same capability to upgrade more often. Not so much for new functionality, but for all the reasons the on-prem users of Oracle e-Business Suite are going through right now. If our enterprise system is subject to a very dangerous security flaw, we need to patch quickly and if we can’t test that quickly, we are down.
Yes, upgrades not patches.
Yes, they are moving to a CI/CD process so more “new features” monthly instead of two big releases a year. Details on how it’ll work haven’t been released yet nor how much of a 
it’ll be for us users.
I am in a broad strokes similar-ish position as you upgrade wise. We have a little bit bigger of an IT operation and certainly more epicor buy in (pouring over time phase reports instead of using MRP seems insane), but we are 10.x on-prem staring down the barrel of an upgrade after continuously putting it off. We have also been on prem since the Vantage days. If epicor wasn’t cutting smart client support next year, we would probably be converting to cloud, but an enormous on prem benefit is that it allows us to upgrade and keep all classic screens and do more of a graduated rollout of browser/kinetic conversions. It is an unfortunate situation that is entirely our fault due to not getting any upgrade buy in for years, but it is the current reality. We can upgrade to the final smart client-supporting version and then work on the conversion to the browser, likely department by department.
It it’s vanilla Jonathan, I am with Jose… it seems like a no-brainer.
Classic.
Roll off sized dumpster fire
Yes, I know there are advocates for CI/CD here that have been asking for this change. I’m not opposed in theory but in execution. As I said, details haven’t been released yet including on what cadence SaaS will be forced to upgrade.
More concerning is the fact they haven’t been doing CI/CD until now.
Back in the day, they’d do new features in dot-updates which would cause issues so they came out with the 2x a year “major” release and bug-fixes as dot-updates plan which has it’s own drawbacks.
I think they’ve been doing CI for a while (at least when Bart was there) but not CD.
Like @Randy said, it will be the implementation. Will they use feature flags? Which kind of deployments? Blue-Green? A/B? Canary? Ramped?
We have been live on the Cloud since 2021. No major hiccups yet. I have my script that I use for each upgrade. We have a small team that helps me to do the testing. We have a consultant that is wonderful and helps us through the stuff we cannot figure out. Yes it is inconvenient that we have to do the upgrades on Epicor’s schedule but we have never had to Flex any of our upgrades yet. I agree that once we experience a major shut down due to an upgrade that our opinion may change. I just always remember that Mark Wonsil told me that on an upgrade weekend make sure you have tested everything, make sure your database is ready, go see a movie and relax and then run your processes on Sunday when the upgrade is done. So far we are very happy we made the switch to the cloud.
Just my two cents:>)