Is anyone using EDA for ERP yet? I was pretty impressed at insights, but the price tag is hard to swallow. I wish they had some better info online as well, but it’s really tough to find anything. An interactive demo with some dummy data would be something that would really help out when trying to convince management to take a look at it.
So is anyone using it? Is it worth it? Likes? Dislikes?
We just got the EDA module. Looks like it’ll be a powerful tool but so far it’s early days for us.
We are looking into it. Right now we are using Microsoft’s Power BI, but I think EDA looks extremely useful for its content packs whereas we have to build all the views to use Power BI. Or do our own data warehousing. @Banderson @Randy I will be interested in your experience with the tool.
@Banderson I got one person from management to look at it after I attended insights last year. EDA was kind enough to do a demo for us and that convinced the viewer to perhaps consider implementing it this year. He will be headed to insights this year so he can get some hands on experience with it.
I wish that we could get a trial run for it because I believe that if management used it for a couple months they would love it. Who knows though.
We are looking at EDA - Epicor Data Analytics - ourselves too and would love more feedback on the experience and thoughts of others who have implemented it.
I received these EDA links from our CAM:
Recording: Epicor Data Analytics Webinar
Additional Resources:
We looked at it but went with Microsoft’s PowerBI instead. I think the value in EDA is that you get the pre-built content packs so if your use of Epicor is pretty standard and you don’t want to spend the time internally developing dashboards then it is probably great.
The content aside, I wasn’t a huge fan of the product itself compared to some of the other BI products I looked at. We settled on PowerBI. The price tag of $10/user/month was much easier to justify, we use office 365 so it was a much smoother experience for our non-epicor users, I trust Microsoft more than Phocas (who makes EDA) to continue to invest in it and I liked the product better.
That is what made sense for us, but the big thing in our decision was that we had specific metrics we wanted to keep in front of people rather than throwing every pre-built metric you can think of in front of someone and hoping it helps them. So the content packs which is what you are really paying for doesn’t have the same value to us as it probably does for most others.
We also don’t mind building the dashboards with the money we saved from not using EDA. With REST, I can pull a BAQ into PowerBI and have it update up a schedule which makes it super easy to create content and it can be made by more of an analyst type than an IT type which is more approachable. We didn’t create a data warehouse like Epicor would make for you with EDA, but that isn’t really necessary for how we are using it.
We’ve implemented EDA. We’re a little different in that we’re combining data from three separate Epicor databases (USA, SE Asia, China) and each database has
multiple companies. The tool is quite powerful. The documentation built into the online help is great and there are tons of EpicWeb education videos on EDA.
The only downside to it is that the field names used in the EDA databases aren’t necessarily the same as the Epicor database field names and there is no published
EDA data dictionary. If you have any questions on the source data, you’ll need to spend some time reviewing the SQL scripts in the Sync tool.
But overall, a great addition to our analytics arsenal.
Mike
Did you guys ever implement it @Randy @utaylor @ERPSysAdmin
@Mike how’s Power BI treating you guys? The fact that you can’t have multiple key relationships seems absurd!
Anyone have any more feedback on EDA 2+ years later?
In particular does anyone know how EDA Permisions work as it ralates to Epicor permissions (ala Territory, Sales Rep Authorized Users etc)
The multiple key relationship thing is wild… I always had to concatenate them into one field and then do the joins…
Yeah who makes an analytics tool that doesn’t work out of the box with 99.99999% of Entities in the market … so weird.
I sense a little dig here 
We dropped EDA as we needed to combine with outside Epicor datasets plus some other reasons. It was a pretty powerful tool but as utaylor and MikeLow say, it can be a bit hard to get your mind around.
What did you guys go with?
A data warehouse and Tableau as they were already using it on the other databases. Tableau was already being used by the other databases so they already had the skills in house. We’re ramping up.
That’s the thing though, if you want to do your own data warehousing and ETL you would have to learn how to use EDA to do that. I saw it demoed at insights and I have no doubt that it is possible with the tool, but there would be a learning curve if you were already using something different before.
Furthermore if you are already using a BI tool in your org and there are people who are used to it, you would have to re-train them.
I think like anything Epicor comes out with the value in this solution is that it is managed by Epicor (for the most part) and they have data cubes already built out. Of course nothing is cookie-cutter and works for everyone so you would have to undertake any customizations or work with a consultant.
I’m with Jose though, it would be cool to hear someone post about it.
So, we’re using it. Not as much as I’d like to just yet, but we’re using it.
As for the points made earlier:
The key field thing is kinds weird, but really works just fine. The root of getting data into EDA is SQL scripts, so you just do your script the way you want, then append a few CONCAT fields to the end and a few other tidbits in the script (parameters and stuff) and it works just fine. Once the data is up there, joining the data sets is easy, but you need to learn the interface, which can be tricky if you’re not in there a lot. Since the data comes from SQL scripts and the Synch tool can support multiple data sources, almost all data is accessible.
XLSX can be loaded up manually and that’s how we do our budget ‘streams’ to be used alongside actual data from ERP loaded via the scripts.
Sales Territories is tricky - and since every user has settable permissions to data, dashboards, and the like, and each of these can have filters and parameters placed on them, we opted to ‘filter’ each salesperson on the Territory field in the data set, and for which operating company they have access to. EDA does NOT use Epicor security model in any way shape or form.
We also created our own top level folders for Finance, Sales, MFG, and Execs - where we copy the delivered Dashboards to and then edit. We do NOT modify any of the delivered content pack stuff since it changes with releases and we use it for any upgrade/changes we need to make.
We’re starting on setting up subscriptions now, and looking at rolling AFR over to the EDA Financial Reports/Budgeting tools later in the fall.
In general, do I love it? Eh, it’s OK, but I like Excel and PowerBI too… Is it user-friendly for regular users - Yes, if they’ve never used a pivot table in Excel. For everyone who has - it’s a new way of looking at data. The best way to say it comes from Epicor’s own Tom Connolly (paraphrased of course) - EDA isn’t a tool to just show the data, you have to ask it a question. The UI is designed to answer questions, not replace Excel Pivots.
Be happy to provide more details - just ask 
Love Tom, great guy. That is the power of it, you can ask it a question and drill in. Self service BI.
Thanks Mike good stuff!
We just went with PowerBI since Microsoft will eventually shift SSRS to PowerBI Paginated Reports, and we already have PowerBI knowledge in house for other apps, it pretty much does the same thing, in my opinion its good enough