Jill, is your consultant on retainer or something? That’s another thing that they wont do here… Any time they have a question if Epicor can do something, if I don’t know the answer and say we need to hire a consultant to figure this out, the project gets dropped… MRP is one example, RMA processing is another, and the biggest one is Scheduling. Our jobs are so screwed up when it comes to scheduling that everyone uses excel spreadsheets to manage their department. @Ernie the elephant in the room just got bigger 
3 Likes
Consultant is not on retainer. We have a 14+ year relationship with our consultant. He is just good at what he does and he takes care of us. We just have to watch how much we use his services. We also have two programmers in house that help with figuring things out. It is tough to sell projects to the upper management. I forward a lot of the Epicor emails I get about new special features hoping to spark some interest from them. It also helps if you have someone that is not upper management that will be the owner of the process you are looking at to help sell the benefits of added features. I do know timing is everything. Good luck!!!
2 Likes
I quickly went thru these posts and one thing I did not see was the third option. First option was stay on site with the second option of going to Epicor. Between those 2 it is manage all hardware and software -vs- pay them to do it and upgrade on their schedule. We went for option number 3, we went to third party hosting company that is an Epicor partner/solution provider. We pay for the hosting, we upgrade on our calendar, and we are web based according to our security standards. Since they are an Epicor partner, if it is something on their side they can call and deal with Epicor.
4 Likes
2 Likes
Thanks for pointing out there is a 3rd option.
1 Like
Two dubya?
yep. Was on yesterday at home and it was nice not needing a VPN
1 Like
I haven’t had the chance to read all the replies yet but I agree with Jill’s response.
We are a smaller company with Outside IT and approximately 50 Epicor users, so this is what works in our situation but certainly may not work for all.
With an outside Managed IT company that is not expert in Epicor, nor would I expect them to be, I think there was more risk with staying on-prem than with moving to the cloud. We had server/technical issues with on-prem when I first arrived here a couple of years ago and the server was due for replacement so the timing was good for reviewing options. I now breathe a sigh of relief the on-prem is a thing of the past.
I have been working with Epicor software since 2010 and have been doing most development (Crystal, SSRS,BPMs/Dashboards, custom screens, UD tables, integrations) with first implementation of Epicor9 on-prem followed by Epicor10 on-prem and recently Kinetic Cloud.
We went live on Kinetic Cloud almost 6 months ago and are fully browser. So glad we followed the browser path rather than running Classic which was a temping decision point. There were some differences in user experience with browser but learning curve was minimal.
We also implemented Epicor IDP so we have multi-factor authentication.
We did side-by-side cost analysis and in our case (outside IT, hardware, etc,) it was more cost effective to go to cloud especially with support/maintenance built into subscription cost.
Our approach for preparing to move to Kinetic Cloud was first to do business process review, including all modules/reports/forms, in Epicor 10 by area. This also allowed me to get better understanding of the business processes of the company. We then set up small groups and ran through the entire process, quote to cash, in Kinetic browser. Eventually, we created Home Pages for each area, as a starting point to setup new users and for training. This approach was also followed in previous implementations elsewhere.
We worked with an invaluable Epicor partner to guide us through the (3) passes but did all testing/tweaking/training ourselves and used Solution Workbench extensively. Most of our “customizations” upgraded automatically from Epicor10 to Kinetic, mostly being BPMs, custom reports and dashboards including dashboards with multi-level subqueries.
Any custom layouts/UI, we have just a few, did have to be redone in Application Studio. I was comfortable doing customizations in Epicor10 but was somewhat apprehensive of learning App Studio but there are so many available/free resources and the concepts remain the same.
Except for Tax Connect, we have no 3rd party integrations, so we are not complex in that area.
We also refer to a script of sort to test in Pilot before each upgrade which is basically the same approach we took when we went live in Kinetic cloud. I have a couple of key users, esp in Finance, to help with the testing before major upgrades. There has been one major upgrade so far and the others incremental so no show-stoppers and we have not had any issues so far.
As I shared, we are a smaller company with Outside IT, so this is what works in our situation but certainly may not work for all. These decisions are always a big undertaking. I find noting each issue/decision/question, one at a time, in the form of a spreadsheet works for me which I have followed through 3 Epicor implementations.
And in response to the original author of this post, @FTI-SeniorAdmin, who said “I would honestly love to not be responsible for keeping Epicor updated anymore”, I couldn’t agree more!! Hope this helps!
3 Likes
We are actually going live with 2024.2 next weekend. We have been working with 2WTech. So far, we have not had major issues with them, they are at Insights (for the past few years) so we are not worried about them not knowing where Epicor is going. We are migrating from a smaller ERP system (that has 20 yrs of history with us). We have well over 100 users in US and globally. I have been doing the updates for the previous ERP and am happy to be done with it. Our IT is happy not to have to deal with all of the new hardware. We are integrated with external Epicor offerings (no issues setting them up) as well as connecting to UKG (other than the UKG API). We have been hit with a few odd things and 2WTech was able to jump in and get things fixed. Their servers are in our Azure cloud so our IT team can keep our security rules on those machines.
1 Like
Sounds like an ideal way to go cloud.
They are really good at being a third party IT dept. Never had any issues with them, also very quick to respond to issues.
I would consider this before going Epicor cloud.
I just now heard about this thread, so I realize I’m late jumping in.
Several of the concerns here, especially around not having enough control in the cloud, are exactly what drove us to deliver the Cloud Management Portal. CMP gives cloud customers the ability to handle things like environment self scheduled upgrade in pilot and production, restarts and basic administrative tasks without having to open a ticket. It also provides more visibility into what’s going on behind the scenes.
It doesn’t solve every difference between On-Prem and a SaaS setup (no direct SQL access… but you have BAQs for that), but it does give back a meaningful amount of control that people have been asking for. If anyone wants more details on what’s available today or what’s coming, reach out to your CAM for more information.
2 Likes
Epicor ReCoder? 
1 Like
Unfortunately I have more or less given up on the CMP as a consultant, it’s a giant pain to try to setup. I know they have now changed the way it works for self sign up, on paper it’s a lot easier, but I have been unable to make it work at all…
1 Like
It works fine, but, your customer has to be willing to set you up with an idp-linked epicor user account in their live system. If their idp is tied to their active directory they may not be willing to do this.
1 Like
The new method doesn’t require this anymore, you just create a user with security manager rights, and use your IDP email and a special group, and it’s supposed to work just like that. But I wasn’t able to get it to work…
1 Like
@HLalumiere curious if you have issues with being an external user to the client. We rely on the cloud management portal, although could support has been quick in response time when needed.
A few of us EpiUsers folks were part of the customer team working with Epicor on this tool set. Pretty much wrapped up the initial goals of the project with self upgrade and self update enabled.
They are adding the other hosting options and other Epicor products as well.
2 Likes
I will revisit this after the holidays when the pre-Christmas storm has passed, it’s probably something I did wrong…
I have it working on one system but I don’t know how I got it working, there is an exceptionally helpful woman named Maddy working on the support team who called me and worked some magic.
2 Likes
As a consultant with access to multiple customers in CMP I can confirm it does work.
The customers I have access to do have is as guests in their IDP.
As far as I’m aware it is not a requirement to have the ECMP_SelfSignUp group assigned. That is for first time registration. The permissions are defined in the CMP with IDP as the login
There is an issue that won’t affect customers but affect anyone with access to multiple tenants in that it can sometimes be tricky to get it to stick on the tenant you want.
2 Likes