PowerBI Dashboard integration

After finding some serious cloud limitations with EDD, as well as, not liking the limited visualizations and dashboard filtering. We have begun looking towards PowerBI because we already have the licenses, and our president knows how to use it.

I was wondering if anyone could provide some insights on how they have gone about deploying PowerBI dashboards to show their epicor data.

I am doing exactly the same. I have wonderful BAQ’s but need to automate the presentation piece. I am working with the FastClose folks that have a slick way of doing this. In effect I would redo my BAQ’s in FastClose which would take care of the export automation. Still developing this, but I will be following and updating this thread as well…

You can pull your BAQs or Epicor tables directly into Power BI through an OData feed, similar to the Excel example near the end of this post: REST Overview Novel

If you are on prem, use oData to read BAQs like Brian said and the PowerBI gateway. I believe the gateway (like most microsoft products) is easier with a “real” SSL cert instead of a self sign.

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I have been implementing PowerBI for our company to review KPI’s using Epicor 10 data since last year. I am learning quite a bit still but it is very easy to pull in existing SQL tables or use OData feeds and API’s to bring in Epicor BAQ’s and Dashboard data. I am pulling in over 65 tables and BAQ’s in my solution and have a 3 tier PowerBI solution for Level 1, 2 and 3 KPI’s. We did have an issue after our last upgrade to 10.2.600.6 from 10.2.400.6 where the self-signed certificate was no longer enough to pull the OData feed. We had to purchase a certificate to get things working again. We did and it has been working flawlessly. We also lost the ability to embed the PowerBI views in our Active Desktop in 10.2.600.6. We were able to do that in 10.2.400.6 and that saved us from having to purchase licenses for users that were only going to view data. In all, I purchased ProLicenses for 43 users and will display info for the other non-analytic users around our shop and in our break rooms as well as on our Epicor Active Homepages (when I get that working again) at a cost far less than EDD. I tried EDD also and wanted to use it but it just didn’t have everything we needed yet and the cost was prohibitive compared to a PowerBI solution.

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Hey all, I don’t want to get “salesy” (is that how you spell that; is that even a word?) here in the forum, but based on some of your struggles you may want to take a quick look at Analogyx BI (https://www.ihstechnologies.net/analogyxbi). It integrates with Epicor, is very robust and VERY easy to implement and use, and quite affordable. Again, sorry for looking like I’m pitching a product, but it sounds like it may help with some of your issues. My apologies if I’ve overstepped!

Kara,
Have you had any luck getting PowerBI views embedded in the Home Page again? I’m trying to get it setup, but all I get is a sign in screen that links me back to PowerBI in a browser - not exactly what I was looking for

Russell

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Also using FastClose (you need Designer and Scheduler) and Power BI - it works very well and has the added advantage that you are using tested business views that are shared by the accounts team.

The holy grail of business intelligence - ‘a single source of truth’

To give you an idea - I used one of the template reports provided by FastClose for margin reporting and was able to produce a multi dimensional margin analysis dashboard in half a day.

No, I haven’t. I got it going (sort of) in the standard interface but it won’t work in Kinetic in .600.6. Disappointing.

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. Kara Bates
Epicor System Analyst

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Kara,
Glad we’re having this conversation - it reminded me to test web access. Guess what - no issues there. So I can’t use it in the smart client, but it is seamless when accessing through a browser. I’ll open a ticket and see if it gets anywhere.
In case you haven’t tried go to:
your server url /Apps/ERP/Home/#/home
I’m SaaS just so you know.
Here’s a test logged in through a browser:

Corresponding test in Client:

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I think this browser thing is going to catch on…

:wink:

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Agreed - but only once we get all the forms we need there! There are still a lot of gaps and the recent batch of Kinetic forms are really buggy. It is exciting to see where they’re going though - it is really cool to be able to embed our external analytics right into the homepages.
:crossed_fingers:

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That’s good info. Thank you! I did bring this up with Professional Services when we were having our upgrade issues and they didn’t have a resolve for me other than showing me it worked when not logged into the kinetic interface. We only use kinetic, though, so we are hoping by .700 it is resolved.

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. Kara Bates
Epicor System Analyst

Phone +1 419.726.1066 Direct +1 419.214.0650
Mobile +1 419.551.4283 Fax +1 419.729.5764 www.wurtec.com
6200 Brent Drive | Toledo,OH 43611
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I’ll really be excited once we start to take advantage of all the loose-coupling that the web has to offer - most specifically WebHooks. Many systems can both publish and subscribe to WebHooks: GitHub, O365, DropBox, etc. In GitHub for example, a WebHook can be set up to an HTTP POST event. The WebHook will contain information about a repository and the action, like a git push. Once new code is pushed into the Repository, another system (quality, CI/DI, etc…) can pick it up and do something with it.

In Epicor it would be very powerful to have a WebHook for a Ready To Processed order. Instead of pushing another @#$! email to a group of users, some real automation can now occur: perform credit checking, inventory availability, enter a task for engineering, update the CRM, update a Slack or Teams channel, EDI ACK, … the possibilities are endless.

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Support was not very helpful. They basically said embedding PowerBI is not possible yet with the Kinetic Home Page (even though I showed him the working version on a web browser). He recommended I create an Idea for this so I did. Please vote for it if you think it’s a useful feature:
https://epicor-manufacturing.ideas.aha.io/ideas/ERP-I-608

Ok - what’s disappointing is that it was working in .400. We used it for months.

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. Kara Bates
Epicor System Analyst

Phone +1 419.726.1066 Direct +1 419.214.0650
Mobile +1 419.551.4283 Fax +1 419.729.5764 www.wurtec.com
6200 Brent Drive | Toledo,OH 43611
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PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION: This message is intended for the named recipient only. It may contain information that is privileged, confidential or otherwise protected from disclosure. The information contained in this document is intended solely for use by the persons or entities identified above. If you are not the intended recipient, be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution or other use of the contents of this transmission is prohibited. If you received this transmission in error, and/or are not the intended recipient, please notify us immediately by telephone 419-726-1066 and permanently delete this message without making a copy.

Just an FYI, EDD is not a BI solution, though with some well written BAQ’s you can get quite a bit out of it. Epicor’s Data Analytics solution is EDA (Epicor Data Analytics) and runs on Phocas, which is a BI Tool. Just mentioning this in case anyone else that happens upon this thread thinks EDD is a BI tool, plus I’ve seen some confusion between EDD and EDA.

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Honestly I am starting to wonder what niche EDD fills.

As a visualization tool I think it falls short, and is a bit clunky. Plus SaaS users cannot add KPIs.

Really? MT SaaS or Public Cloud SaaS? When I was on Public Cloud I’m pretty sure I was able to add new views with my own BAQ.

EDD is powered by BAQs so the information is real time and provides user security context by default. I find it replaces the instances of an Excel spreadsheet that downloaded BAQ data (OData or downloaded manually) and presents it with drill-down/filtering capability. So things like how many employees are clocked onto a job, how many items in receiving inspection by days waiting, top 10 oldest unpaid A/R invoices are the kinds of questions that EDD does best.

EDA and other BI tools are generally point in time reporting tools and are only as up-to-date as the last export. These types of BI tools answer question about performance over time instead of at the moment.

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Does EDA configure the export and structure of the data it consumes? I would love to know more about point in time and summarization reporting tools as I feel it’s something out of the box epicor tools are not optimized for