PowerBI Dashboard integration

I believe so. At least that’s how it looks in the demos I’ve seen.

I’m unaware of any ERP system has those capabilities “in the box”. Sales Force uses Tableau, Dynamics use the Power Platform, SAP uses Data Analysis…

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Do you know if EDA allows for building of custom “views”? Reason I ask is we have a pretty custom structure for reporting and I would be curious if EDA is only built for standard things

https://www.phocassoftware.com/demos

@Aaron_Moreng, It does allow making custom views. The benefits of EDA is that they have a bunch of canned views that you can use, but you can make your own, or modify what’s there (copy and change if I remember correctly). I sat through a demo of it at the last insights, and you could start with a blank slate if you wanted (like power BI). But that would negate a lot of the value that you would pay for.

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Do you use EDA? We have a pretty complex scenario that I think this could help solve, involving ud tables and their child tables. I’m setting up a demo with epicor but I’m more interested in the perspective of peers and colleagues who use it :wink:

I just attended one hands on of the sessions at insights. One of the the exercises was to make a new view, and it was fairly straightforward (for a technical type user). We never bought it though. It was really expensive for us, and frankly, our execs were not interested in any of that information, so while I though it was cool and could be useful, convincing the GM who didn’t even log into Epicor that it was going to be helpful for ~12K a year wasn’t going to happen. (this was from a previous job)

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Hey all I can field some of your questions on bi products…

EDA is a cloud data warehouse and dashboarding platform. As noted above we ship an out of the box data warehouse design and data extract scripts and you can extend the ETL and the data warehouse model to bring in more data. However, extending the etl in saas is limited since those scripts are sql run directly against databases. The benefit of EDA is as stated above we’re not just selling you a tool the value is in the pre built data warehouse which can take major effort to build on your own from scratch. If you want to get an extensible data warehouse up and running quickly EDA is a good option, but there are reasons to build your own warehouse from scratch.

EDD is an interactive dashboarding tool which is intended to fill our future bi dashboarding needs particularly embedded analytics within our products, but not act as a data warehouse where you collect data just a query tool. So it and does not store any data permanently it’s running queries directly against data sources you connect it to and the intention is to allow us to mix real time and warehoused data then embed that directly into our applications rather than create a data warehouse. EDD against live erp is included with ERP for all users. EDD advanced adds kpi goal setting, connection to other data sources (analysis services warehouses, odata, more to come in future versions) and a few other features. There was a comment above about edd not supporting kpis in SaaS ERP. That’s not the case the new kpi feature released in 10.2.600 is available in advanced edd on SaaS there was a bug not an intentional product limitation.

Using Powerbi (or other embeddable bi dasbhoards/warehouses) with ERP. There are a lot of good reasons to do a best of breed approach and build a warehouse or just use an additional dashboarding tool of your own. You want something more powerful that we provide in the box, you already have other systems feeding a preferred warehouse or reporting tool, etc.

With power bi specifically it allows for embedding pbi dashboards into other web applications and kinetic erp has a couple of embed-a-third-party-website options. One is on homepage and in 700 you can use a similar web embedding widget in our screen customizations in app studio. So we support embedding any https website into kinetic, but what we don’t do is test or guarantee that specific third party websites work this way because browser support is really up to those vendors. And that’s why you see things like power bi working just fine within kinetic run in chrome or firefox but if you run inside of our client where we are using an embedded browser control that’s not common based on chromium it may or may not work. Generally if it works it chrome it works, but not 100%. There are differences.

This is going to be much less of a problem as we get past epicor 11 and move towards our browser only feature because of course folks who put out web applications test in all the major browsers.

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One more note on getting data to power bi in the first place… We have a newer product offering in SaaS which is a read only replicated database copy which you can run sql queries against. This is now the best solution for doing custom etl to arbitrary systems if you are a saas customer because you can do bulk query extracts. So you can do for example azure data factory pipelines to etl data from there to anywhere or just use powerbi’s built in simple etl using sql against it to pull data.

The odata and other rest mechanisms for pulling data works for small data, but our rest apis aren’t really built for bulk data extract and will be much much slower to pull data than through a sql connection.

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Indeed, REST (or GraphQL) are more transaction oriented. The one issue with the SQL pull is we lose all security controls and those have to be recreated in the BI system. The Data Science people are challenged with managing big data sets too and are doing some interesting things with gRPC. It would be interesting to see a similar idea with BAQ infrastructure instead of pure SQL. One could add some extra value by creating “incremental pulls” based on SysRowIDs and SysRevIDs. We’re talking about BI but eventually people may want to build some ML models with their Epicor data.

Just a thought…

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IMHO all they need is BAQ export to Azure Data Lakes and Amazon S3 and then you can ingest those with whatever BI tool you want.

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@John_Mitchell we might one day provide an inbuilt data lake pipe, but in the mean time we felt that the most flexible solution to do first was simply provide a sql replicant that you can talk to which lets you do whatever you want including push things to a data lake of your choice or just do selective query, etc. With that you can pretty much build whatever the appropriate etl is to whatever you need vs. us dictating the output location.

Mr. Conner (@bconner),

I’ve been doing some research concerning Epicor in the cloud and the possibility of using PowerBI. I’ve read through this thread and it seems as though others are using it, but I’m not really clear if it’s possible. Maybe I’m missing something, but this is my situation. My company has subsidiaries using Epicor in the cloud (and I believe they’re all on the Azure platform, controlled by Epicor as SaaS cusotmers). The team I’m apart of supports the subsidiaries with their system, customizations, and reporting. Is it possible to use PowerBI either internally or externally as the reporting system at all? If so, how would this be setup and/or connected so we can support them?

Just to warn you, I am a bit new to Epicor and ERP’s in the cloud. Most of my experience has been in Microsoft Dynamics GP and on premise environments having a direct access to SQL data. I mention that to let you know I am experienced in SQL and creating queries but I’m still getting used to my data in the cloud and using BAQ’s.

Kent,

We are starting to implement PowerBI dashboards with our Epicor Cloud. We have found the easiest solution to be to pull data from Epicor by using REST connections that grab BAQs. The only downside is that it can be a bit of a clunky method with large datasets.

This is the best resource on REST that I have found: REST Overview Novel

In terms of physically connecting it to PowerBI it would be a “From Web” connection.

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Carmen,

Thank you for this information. I really appreciate it.

So are you using PowerBI desktop or PowerBI.com for your reporting?

Phocas (Vanilla), gives you this, I am not 100% if EDD gives you that capability. There is also a tool named Phocas Sync, which you can extract your own data how you want with multiple connection methods. We used Phocas to merge all our historical data from our previous system withe our Epicor data.

Just saw some demos of Power Automate
and Power Automate Desktop…Socks blown off totally. I could see some great repeatable UAT tests, and event driven flows.

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We originally were using PowerBI.com, but we didn’t want to have to pay $9.99 per user per month, so we switched over to using PowerBI desktop.

PowerBI.com has some fun features such as auto and incremental refreshes that help with the clunkiness of the REST connection, but the price scheme was a huge turn off. We didn’t want to have to pay for consumers to view reports.

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@Hally Where where theses demos on Power Automate that you saw. I am interested in what it might be able to do.

Hi @GTI07094 ,
Do a search for power automate desktop on YouTube. The first ones I looked at and subscribe to were Kevin Stratvert and Leila Gharani. The one from April Dunnam should be good, she is a Power Platform Developer Advocate at MS, ad had a presentation on at Ignite.

Hope that helps.

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Thank you for the lead Hally

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