Morning All,
My company has made the decision to move from Epicor 10 on-prem to Kinetic Cloud. I was wondering if there were any of you out there that would be willing to share any of your positive or negative experiences with moving to Kinetic Cloud.
The company I work for has been on cloud the entire time I’ve been here, so I can’t comment on the transition experience specifically. I will mention that since it will already be a bit of a disruption, its a good time to review your entire implementation and what modules, customization’s, etc are actually being used.
Having someone else manage your Epicor instance cuts down on the work quite a bit, but minimizing customizations, using existing features to the fullest, and following standardized business practices can really build on the savings you get from moving to the cloud.
Its not a bad time to think about ditching crusty/incorrect/unneeded data as well.
We went from E10 on-prem to Kinetic SaaS cloud back in 2022. Since we did it as part of an version upgrade it went pretty smoothly as the needed downtime was worked into the schedule. Only took a few extra hours to xfer the local DB backup up to Epicor to restore to our cloud.
Thanks for the reply!
Are you able to give your opinion on general performance and order entry performance of the system?
As I mentioned, I can’t do an apples to apples comparison as I’ve only been on cloud. What I can say is REST API calls and BAQ’s are snappy. I did notice a slight performance improvement when we went from MT cloud to DT “public” cloud. There are parts of the UI that are slower than what would be accepted in consumer software, but from reading these forms, is average Kinetic/Epicor behavior.
Since its mostly on the UI end and not the network end, I do actually notice a fairly large improvement with better client hardware. So the server is not the bottle neck.
Pretty much what @Evan_Purdy said. Server side was actually a slight improvement from on-prem we feel it’s because our local server was long-in-the-tooth and due for replacement. Smart client was sometimes a little slower on initial opening of forms but not enough to cause concern.
@ccampos24747
I have helped several customers move from On Prem to the Cloud.
My experience was very positive in working through the process.
I have done some that upgraded from Vantage 8.3 and the hard part was the UOM setup. If you are already on 10 - it should go rather smoothly and could be done in just few months.
When we had the database loaded, I always had it placed in the Live environment vs Pilot so you are able to immediately see the true performance of the new setup.
If you aren’t currently using Kinetic user interface I would suggest.
Epicor also has a webinar coming up next week on moving to the Browser.
You’ve mentioned that you haven’t experienced the management side, so I am curious as to how you arrived at this conclusion. For our company, we have limited technical personnel, so we outsource to an MSP. As far as ERP goes, it only takes 1 day to stand up an infrastructure and install the latest version, PLUS move your data. Our recent upgrade took 3 hours for ERP and a bit longer on the IT side. The hardest part remains whether you have Epicor hosting it or not - you must test. and arguably, you now must test more often. This doesn’t eliminate any concern, nor will it eliminate any expenditure for us.
Also looking for similar feedback. Has anyone moved from their own private cloud to Epicor’s hosted? And liked it?
If you already have a MSP doing the hardware, sql, etc etc for Epicor, than going cloud won’t make your life easier.
Unlike the above, testing only requires regular users. It may be hard to get them to do it, but the skills required are there. And the less customized you are, the less things you have to break on updates.
We only test on major updates, and that has served us alright so far.
It looks like there’s just positive experiences with it so far.
When on their cloud, they push major releases frequently, and the previous few have not been as stable as we would like. So, prepare to be a beta tester for them.
I’m really sorry to hear that you’re moving to the cloud. Epicor has a terrible cloud offering. We have been on their SaaS model since we originally went live in 2022 and have been very unhappy with it from both a performance and technical support standpoint. If we could do it all over again, we would have gone on-prem. Unfortunately, you will need to be prepared for a very frustrating technical support experience. They are happy to sell you the product, but they aren’t prepared to support it properly. We have been fighting with them about performance/reliability/stability for years and they seem to be mostly deaf to it.
Your profile says MT, if that is true I suspect DT might solve a large portion of your complaints.
We’re looking into that right now as well as potentially moving on-prem. What was your experience like moving from MT to DT? Was it painless or was it a process?
It was way more painful than I wanted as I felt like they should have done it for free and it should have been a standardized process, with a standard export script and testing procedure.
Instead I had to get quotes from professional services, argue about prices, times, etc. That was really disappointing. MT is such a bad product they should be getting people off it for free.
We did a test migration, which had several issues, like UD fields missing and the like. I was responsible for making a solution workbench with all out customizations and reports.
You would think they’d have it nailed down, but this is Epicor we’re talking about. They can’t publish a point release without breaking some sort of core functionality… I totally agree with you that MT is a joke.
That’s disappointing to hear, though. How long did the process take from start to finish for you to make the switch? I imagine there was a lot of repeat test runs before you were confident enough that the migration was 100%. Was there anything you found down the road after going live that was missed during the migration?
I feel like there was something minor, but the old system was left online for a month after we migrated and I was able to look at it for what I needed. The hardest part was like every upgrade, getting people to take it seriously and test. And getting the timing such that we didn’t have an update and migration to deal with at the same time, or large internal projects.
I mean, they pretty much just spin up a new environment, and you can request data refreshes from your live. So it can take as long as you want. If I had some experienced help, we probably could have gotten through it in a week. But because I was scared and there were a lot of other things going on, it took more like a month I think.
I know @aosemwengie1 has experience with both ways and doesn’t tend to sugar coat things.
I can appreciate this response. Moving back to on-prem may also be down the road as well once we establish the new VMware replacement. That’s a long conversation in and of itself.
I’m not sure I’d go SaaS knowing that the long-term plan was to return to on-prem. If you don’t have the knowledge to run your own Azure (or other cloud) just yet a MSP can help you. Plus it’s the best of both worlds; It’s in the “cloud” yet it’s yours so you’re “On Prem” as far as Epicor goes.
We’ve had the same amount of “bad” experiences with support when we were on prem as we have since going DT SaaS. So I count that as a wash.