Hello All, Is having Epicor yearly maintenance really needed? It’s expensive and don’t really know what it does for us. Would love any and all thoughts on this subject.
Thank you in advance.
Yes, it is expensive. I have seen that once people stop, they are generally on a path to replacement. There are no more upgrades or patches. While the software won’t change, the world does. There may be new tax or compliance requirements from the government or one of your customers. Environmental changes in Windows and SQL upgrades could come into play and there may be security patches that break the functionality and you won’t be able to get any support from Epicor. You might be able to pay Professional $ervices for a fix but they may just say upgrade and you’ would have to pay all back support to catch up or if the time was too long, repurchase. Again, then it’s time to look at a new ERP system.
There used to be 3rd party support options but I am not aware of any now but I will leave that for others.
FWIW, cloud users do not pay extra for support. It’s included in the subscription.
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when we were on E9 on Prem, we stopped the yearly maintenance and were able to handle everything in house since we weren’t getting updates on E9 anymore. Was definitely a money saver. If we ran into something we couldn’t overcome we would engage a consultant but that was pretty few and far between and cheaper than a yearly service fee.
I get this question from time to time and my answer is think of it as an insurance. If something goes wrong, and it kind of does sometimes, you have Epicor to ask for assistance. Not a third party, the same guys who developed the software. I would say, for some, it is definitely possible without the yearly service, but I would not do it as it is not worth the risk. I can imagine the ERP being down, calls from everywhere what do we do, when it’s back online, and I’m browsing the internet trying to find the closest available Epicor consultant.
I would say the only way yearly maintenance is not needed, is if you aren’t going to connect your network to the internet. If you are 100% siloed from everything else, and you want to stay in your current state indefinitely, then fine.
But since that’s basically impossible for almost every shop, to continue to stay ahead of bad actors, and benefit from improvements that are made, you’ll need to keep up on maintenance. You should also do regular upgrades because the smaller the jump, the easier the upgrade is.
Software isn’t the finished product it once was. It’s constantly evolving and changing to meet new needs and to stop ever more creative criminals. It sucks that it’s as expensive as it is, but it’s harder than we realize once you get into the details.
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NOTE: I am a 23.75 year Epicor Employee answering this question… so you might consider my answer as self promoting…
But… I used to be a customer as well. I purchased software from Epicor, and we made the choice to always pay the annual maintenance. It was our choice. Our former software was “shoemaker ware” and depended on @timshuwy to maintain it, fix it, fix any database issues, etc. One of my desires was to safeguard our company from any risk “just in case” @Timshuwy had an accident while driving to/from work (I drove the following road every day: Ortega Highway is one of the California’s bloodiest drives)
Anyway, fast forward 25 years later, and my former employer is STILL on maintenance. Yes, they could have saved some money, but they would not have had access to continual updates/upgrades. They would not have been able to increase their user licenses when they had a merger that added more users.
Sometimes for Legacy customers, in order to incentivise them to upgrade, we offer good discounts if they upgrade and move to the cloud. But that only happens if they stay on maintenance.
Now that we have a cloud offering, as someone else pointed out… things have changed. Instead of purchasing a license and then paying support, you subscribe to the software in the cloud. The subscription includes the support.
If you are on an older version / on-prem, talk to your CAM about what you can do to move to the cloud.
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If you ever create tickets with Epicor Support, you will no longer be able to without maintenance.
Meaning that they were already planning to move to a different ERP (like after a merger or whatever).
But the implication in this is that if you didn’t plan to slowly kill your Epicor implementation, and you stop paying for maintenance, you have effectively doomed it anyway.
Since 10.2.500, I have needed one of the new features in pretty much every upgrade - or at least every other one.
- 10.2.500 - Epicor Functions introduced
- 10.2.600 - Improved Kinetic MES (allowed us to hold off on buying more “Default” user licenses)
- 10.2.700 - Last pre-Kinetic release, as we waited for Kinetic to get better…
- 2021.1 - Stable version of App Studio introduced
- 2022.2 - Last net.tcp release while we waited for a bug to be fixed with SSL certs
- 2022.2 - Most Kinetic scrolling & window bugs fixed; Kinetic dashboard creator introduced (actually called the “Basic Application Wizard” in App Studio)
I just cannot imagine not upgrading regularly.
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