The Minor upgrades aren’t a big deal. The Major ones, it depends on the benefit, unfortunately I am not at all impressed with Epicor’s QA department. Some of the bugs that come out are like woah a basic Unit Test oughta catch that.
Examples (fictional, but those who read the release notes know what I am refering to):
- “Calculated Grand Total wrong.”
- “MRP suggested to order more than you should oh and it ignored Purchased Material”.
I want to trust the computer and question my sanity not the other way around. We have come to a point where we question the logic before anything. The business users end up blaming Epicor first, process second - in several cases they were right, I can’t win. An incorrect BOM could cause a product recall (yes it could also be fat fingered, but lets assume it wasnt).
Bugs will exist I agree, but some modules like finance, payroll, ordering, shipments should be QA tested very well. I have seen trucks being searched because the BOL showed it being 120lbs lighter than it was due to some software miscalculating weight, who pays for those fees and inconveniences? How do you explain to your customer - yeah our XYZ Shipping Software had a bug, so the truck driver was accused of smuggling drugs, but on our entry screen it showed the correct weight =)
You have seen those bugs being fixed and wondered how was this even acceptable. For that reason I wait usually before upgrading to a Major upgrade, it hasn’t been stable. Here is a simple one on 10.1.500.x go to a Part and under MRP set your min and max to 1 and then create a SO with a Release of 100 - you should get 100 jobs, but instead >50 will crash your MRP, Epicor was able to recreate it - yet it took no effort to recreate, just a simple setting.
If you download MICR IEx and you deploy the .zip to the client it will not work… why? Because the .zip has sub-folder it will go to SubFolder* instead of the root of your Client, the fix is to unzip it and re-zip it right… Didn’t take much effort, deploy it and try it. How are they missed, I don’t know.
Overall, the decision is usually “It Depends”. We review the Release Notes as a Team for 15 minutes every 2 weeks.
If you have a developer sandbox, its good to keep up to date and play around.