We have just set up a test environment for Epicor 10.2 and wanted to deploy a few “Discovery Views” in the Home page menu. When we started looking for documentation on EDA and EDD we couldn’t seem to find anything other than a product brochure. Can anyone point us to where we can locate technical info on what views are available out of the box, and how to deploy them? The next step would be what does it take to create your own views?
This looks to be very useful technology and it certainly wasn’t presented in a very proactive manner in the upgrade documents that I viewed of course I didn’t do the install either. For what it is worth we were able to upgrade (from 10.1.400.11) without too much trouble once we worked out some app server issues.
My understanding is that nothing comes standard in EDD. They were demoing EDD with the EPM cubes at Insights and I was told that you will have to build all of your own BAQ’s / Cubes.
Thanks all, I get that, but according to the brochure and Insights presentation there were supposed to be some out of the box views we could deploy. I cannot find any mention in the documentation regarding this functionality; even if it were a licensed feature. I guess not a lot of folks have looked into this as of yet, surprised as it was one of the most intriguing upgrade features.
I’ve seen what Mark said in a web-ex (about EDD), and I’ve also gotten a response from our rep that said it was included in the base. So I can’t seem to find a definitive answer for EDD.
Thanks for posting this info, it is similar to the info I had found. Yet nothing seems available on “how to” in 10.2. I am really surprised, makes no sense to me, or I am missing something very obvious.
Any Epicor folks out there have any info you can share? I guess I could always call support, but I find that this forum is better informed.
Our apologies for the confusion. Maybe I can clear things up.
Data Discovery Basic is included as a part of the Base ERP Product in 10.2.100.x and that includes building your own custom EDD views against your own BAQ, using the product standalone in a browser, mobile device, or embedding those views in the Active Homepage.
Data Discovery Advanced is an offering that is not yet available for Sale. That adds (among other things) Connecting to additional data sources outside ERP such as Analysis Services Cubes (EPM Cubes, others). The complete featureset on this is not yet annouced, but there will be more than just other datasources.
Our apologies for the confusion on this topic. We made a late decision to switch what was included with ERP (in your favor) and to add more features to Advanced before making it available for sale which has led to some confusion as we’d previously communicated a Core, Basic, and Advanced licensing breakout.
On this topic. The keynote demonstration at insights last year showing a custom warehouse map with inventory lighted up on shelves was EDD advanced against one of the existing EPM inventory cubes. So that capability is not available yet to you, but upcoming. Not demoware I promise! We did also demonstrate using BAQ elsewhere at the conference. From an end user perspective btw the experience is essentially the same between baq and cubes it’s just that cubes can scale much larger and the data available is more organized into business friendly groups, etc.
We do include some standard views with EDD for use on the homepage and some of those are contained in the new Active Homepage Layout Templates. There are 51 premade views that you can start from as a sample which are all based on BAQ so they are available with the included-with-erp Basic edition.
Last answer for now wrt how you get edd installed:
Active homepage will be deployed automatically, but getting access to the edd views requires installing edd first as it’s a standalone web application and the integration in homepage is just us embedding it (much like adding a social tile to homepage, you have to first install social). And there’s additional licensing to add the basic license and grant rights to users to create custom views, etc.
EDD is an extension installer which you can install via the administration console. There’s a new “Data Discovery” tab in there alongside the existing ones for social, etc.
The standard views will be automatically deployed as part of that installation. Instructions for doing this install are in the Epicor10_NewInstallGuide_102100.pdf New installation Guide under 7.8 Install Epicor Data Discovery. Looking now I see that we did not include a pointer from the Release Upgrade Guide to actually show you how to do a first time EDD installation so maybe that’s why you are having difficulty finding the instructions? I will follow up internally and see if we can adjust that so others don’t get lost in the future.
Note that once you have edd installed to get the EDD Basic functionality there is a license that needs to be installed if you want to create new views based on your own BAQ (not the one’s we provide out of the box) and then assign users to them to grant create rights. You can do this within the EDD UI after it’s installed in the administration section.
Note: You can get an EDD Basic license via your account manager. As I said previously it’s a no-charge item for all of you existing customers for 10.2.100, but because we decided to change what was included rather late there’s still this extra license to get and install. Apologies for that added complexity.
Brian - thanks for all the information! I was preparing a similar email to you (as we just got our 10.2 Dev server set up) and I’m glad to see you’re on top of it.
Hey one other thing i forgot to say earlier. The subject suggests you are also looking to deploy Epicor Data Analytics and we only discussed EDD.
Just in case it’s not clear Epicor Data Analytics is a standalone cloud based data warehouse which is an entirely different BI product from Data Discovery. That one has it’s own install guide and is an additional product not included with ERP base product. If you all have questions about that product feel free to drop them here as well. The installation guide for Epicor Data Analytics is a separate document that you can find on epicweb (but if you can’t let me know and I’ll go hunt it up for you).
Thanks Brian, that cleared up all of our current questions. Our immediate inquiry is with regards to EDD. We will be looking into EDA a bit further down the road as we are an EPM license holder but are finding the product too complex for our purposes.
We’re doing our EDA implementation right now (two guys from Epicor are on site with us today/tomorrow), so If you have any questions I can either answer them myself or ask them.
So far I really like it for it’s simplicity. We also tried EPM and never really got it working properly b/c of it’s complexity. EDA is much easier, but at the same time it’s not the same as a regular BI/dashboard tool. It’s whole engine looks at the data and presents it differently - so there is a little learning curve to get your head around.
Just guessing that doing this would probably violate the Epicor license agreement most people have in place. Do you have a test server you could install 10.2 & EDD on to get this? The install / configuration is very simple.
I could totally see that if you paid for EDD, but since it’s free with 10.2 I don’t see any value in keeping all of the knowledge secret. I’m specifically wondering if their Sales Gross Margin calculation matches the Sales Gross Margin report.
