We are finally looking into upgrading from Epicor 9.05.702A to the latest E10 release and have some questions. We are faced with deciding to perform the upgrade ourselves or to utilize Epicor themselves to assist with the upgrade. Have any of you had experience with either or especially with both? We have many Crystal reports, BAQs and BPMs which will need to be redone according to the analyzer. Is the cost for Epicor’s assistance worth it?
We are also considering going from on premise to cloud based. Maybe not right at the beginning but maybe later down the road once E10 is up and running. Upsides? Downsides?
There are good threads on here about the process. We are currently also in the beginning of this and the two things I would recommend is use the Epicor Upgrade services Portal and to consider using their data upgrade package. You get access to the portal from your CAM. It gives you a detailed report on your system and ranks for complexity. The data conversion is three rounds for I think $3600 and I believe they will do data fixes until the round is deliverable to you.
We are looking at using our Epicor consultants in addition to professional services.
Its hard to beat the automated upgrade tool that Epicor provides in the cloud to update your DB.
They provide 2 DBs: one with custom stuff (BPMs/Customizations) and one without. This allows testing to start without waiting for fixes to custom stuff.
You will need someone to help uplift the custom stuff and possibly rewrite reports either way.
If you are thinking of being a Multi-Tenant SaaS client, this is a great option.
Or Public Cloud (AKA Dedicated Tenant - not sure they’re even selling new MTs anymore.) We used it moving from Single Tenant hosted by Epicor to Public Cloud in Azure and it works great. One of the best values Epicor provides in my humble opinion.
Ah yes. A lot happens in a year.
The new Azure offerings are not only a great deal, but also a good choice for many customers. I would say a third of the customers I’ve worked with in the last 5 years should at least look at this new service.
I MUCH prefer going home on the weekend, going to a movie, spending time with my family, and checking in on the upgrade Sunday afternoon. But that’s just me
What can I say, the Epicor plumbing really gets me going
After all testing is done, all app servers and the db server can be upgraded and configured correctly in 4 hours vs 12-24 for managed services. I’m not trying to criticize anyone, just stating the typically with an MSP things take much much longer to get done in a correct and consice fashion for every unique business infrastructure (for moving between E10 versions).
Every business IT infrastructure (especially with ERP) is unique. And qualified, trained personal on site who only manage that environment are invaluable and can assist with all sorts of issues including upgrades in a much more timely manner (with the added bonus of clear, infrastructure specific, documentation).
Additionally, all the sysadmin options you would ever need. Proactive alerting on core system performance, full control over scheduled DMT tasks etc. I could go on, but system management is completely up to you on-prem. But with great power comes great responsibility…
We haven’t done the E9 to E10 upgrade, since we’ve only been using Epicor from E10.
But we have done the smaller upgrades, and for my little input:
Epicor’s assistance is really good now for the “standard” parts of the process. As others have mentioned, the whole upgrade tool suite works well and makes the core part of the upgrade project much more reliable and faster. There are also Epicor people then at your disposal who know best how to make sure the little implementation details are done right, which can make the difference between a sluggish nightmare of a system and one which hums along sweetly. In summary, I would 100% recommend getting formal paid Epicor help for the upgrade.
The other side is that if (as you say) you have a lot of bespoke things in your system, I really wouldn’t assume that Epicor will go very far to sorting those out. You might be lucky, but probably nobody is going to be better at doing that than the people already familiar with them, and Epicor won’t be. If you’re expecting them to do much towards those components you will probably be disappointed. Better to use the time and headspace freed up by their help with the core upgrade to really focus on the bits of your system that are unique to your company.
Really hard to give a definitive answer as you do not mention anything about the internal resources available and the skills/expertise that your organisation have within Epicor and also whether tey can be made available full or part time. Also you do not mention how quickly you want this to happen as that is a significant factor in whether you do it yourself.
My experience - our organisation, bought E10 in 2014 planning to migrate from Vantage - at that time Epicor’s own fast track conversion processes did not really exist - what they offer now is completed transformed and they offer a proven, mature fast tracked conversion. We burnt through all of their consultancy budget in 6 months and got nowhere - Epicor not blameless but largely our fault. I was hired in early 2015 as a one man band IT and ERP team to recover the project- I hadn’t used Vantage/E10 before but had lots of ERP project/major IT experience- we pretty much started again and I did most of the install including an upgrade to a newer version of E10 and all the data migrations/data cleansing (70000 parts in complex boms) and all the reports and all the user training/process documentation. We had some limited help from Epicor on some functional areas (planning/MRP) however we came off maintenance in mid 2015, never to return, but went live without a hitch in November 2016.To give some context we turnover £12m and have over 100 employees.
You can do it yourself - I my experience yourself is quite literal, even with limited experience of Epicor, but be prepared for a lot of work and for it to take much longer.
Other significant point is to really understand what you are trying to achieve - if you are just taking what you have in E9, uncleansed data and all, and porting to E10 with just a wee bit of work to get things like BPM’s converted getting Epicor to do the conversion work will always be the best and easiest option. If you are trying to put any kind of data cleansing/system reconfig into the mix then getting Epicor to do the migration is probably not the best option - you probably are looking at some kind of hybrid model with Epicor doing some work - for example the initial setup but internal folks doing the migrations .
I love how this is going, maybe as a brief summary this can help you out (everyone else feel free to comment if I’m off base):
Fully Epicor MSP/support/SAAS solution: your organization needs the out of the box Epicor experience and processes with limited customization and system management. Core system upgrades/data conversion only on their schedule. Customizations can take a long time to deploy.
Single tenant EMS hosted: Epicor manages upgrades and data conversions. Epicor installs data fixes and manages the back end infrastructure. You have full control over the full customization aspect of the system. You follow Epicors upgrade process (clean install, new servers) but only schedule when needed. Extremely limited visibility into system performance, automated server/db level tasks.
On-Prem: you have a support contract and Epicor helps with issues you submit. You or your third party MSP manage the app/db servers and configure according to Epicor spec. You have full control over SQL, Windows server applications. Also full control over managing and configuring Epicor, from the license to your data refreshes. You also have full control over the upgrade process…Single tenancey has some caviats with upgrades (force you to do a “clean install” of Epicor so you need to package up and move all of your customizations, reports, rdds, report styles, menu items, menu security, baqs, dashboards, posting rules, quick searches, bpms, at go live) instead of upgrading in place and just fixing (between every E10 release, not update)
OK, we’re high-jacking this thread. Like @jgehling, knowing what’s going on under the hood also gets me going too but there are quite a few corrections in his last reply. The on-prem vs cloud deserves its own thread, which I’ll start later and correct some of Jeff’s assertions there.
As for the original post, if I were moving from 9 to 10, ESPECIALLY if moving from Progress to SQL, you will not be able to do the conversion cheaper than Epicor can do it for you. You will burn through that money in salary alone. They have done it hundreds of times. They know how to handle the bad data you’re sending them. They can understand their Upgrade Manuals - at least better than I can If time and money are no object to you and you may want to do this for others in the future and the skill-set is important to you, do it yourself. Epicor has the full power of Azure to scale up CPU, memory and disc which cuts the time way down. If you don’t mind waiting for the conversions to run on your own hardware. Again, do it yourself.
It doesn’t matter if you’re on-prem or in the cloud in order to use this service. IMHO this is a great service that is really difficult to beat.
We used the cloud service to upgrade from Vantage 8 to E10, the biggest problem we had was getting the templates correct for the UOM’s and we had support from epicor with this, I think though our database went through 20+ conversions to iron out the issues.
All significant customisations / bpm’s were upgraded by CSG, to make this process smoother a detailed spec of the customisations was written by a consultant and CSG had a copy of the database so they could take each one and rewrite it to E10.
I appreciate this thread was E9 to 10 but I just thought I would add my experience. Without the cloud conversion tool we would have had to re-implement and lose all the historical data, whereas we were able to just upgrade.
Cirrus upgraded our 10GB progress database in 36 hours, 18 months ago when this was not available to Vantage customers we were looking at nearly a week to do all the conversions etc.
We uploaded the database on Friday eve and over a bank holiday weekend installed the converted database configured it and had it running on Tuesday morning for Go Live, SSRS reports and existing custom crystal reports were reconfigured in advance.
Not advocating doing it yourself, just that it can be done, but it will take lots of time. Reality is that had this service been available when our company bought Epicor there would have been no debate they could have migrated Vantage to E10 in a weekend - what they probably ultimately only needed to do - and then actually thought about whether they really wanted to re-implement/reconfigure/start using new features.
All of your responses have been so helpful and I thank you all! Keep em coming.
To answer @mcfreedombaby, our internal resources include:
Myself full-time for customizations, BAQs, BPMs, reporting, support, etc.
2 others full-time who are programmer/developers
1 system/network admin
I would say that 6 months would be our projected timeline for the project.
First, for the general response to the management and execution of the Upgrade Services offering. I don’t own that area but work with those folks constantly and follow incoming issues - from a few a week a year or two ago to an occasional issue every couple of weeks. I am happy the efforts put into the conversions are recognized.
Second, the ability to throw Azure ‘hardware’ at this is a statement to not be overlooked. I feel my new job title at Epicor show be FinDev (Financial Developer) as the ability to throw some massive hardware at issues is extremely powerful and easy (and costly if not careful). Harnessing scale-able computing power is something we are putting effort into so as to give us all the best performance for the cost. I am not over exaggerating when I state I doubt you will have the same abilities to do the brute force efforts in this area as cheaply.
Thanks all for the feedback and loving the conversation and more importantly working towards helping a fellow partner in their efforts.
Go with the Upgrade (Cloud) service it is cheap, effective and gets you out of the plumbing work. Then you can focus on uplifting your customizations, bpms, baqs and dashboards. But the upgrade process itself leave to Epicor.
The Cloud Tool is amazing, I can tell you from experience I was involved early on and did some testing for them with a pretty gnarly progress database, they put a ton of work into it. It is way faster than the standard upgrade tool, and the fact that you get a copy of your data (Vanilla) which you can test the numbers quickly without hassle is amazing.
The initial upgrade we did on Prem took over 168 hours days to complete (because of the size of some of the tables PartTran in particular held over 18 million rows) the on-prem tool is not smart enough to process a table across multiple threads, so for particularly large tables it chews on it for days without any help, once we went to the cloud we were able to perform the whole upgrade in less than 17 hours. They wrote special provisions in-there for large tables which split it up into bite size pieces.
You can’t beat the price, now in terms of using Epicor for uplifting the customizations, reports, bpms etc that’s a different bear. I recommend doing that in-house if you have the expertise, nobody knows your business better than you and with 10 the odds are you probably won’t need a lot of those old BPMs and such.
Don’t underestimate the no longer need. Spend your time doing the gap analysis between old version and new and the intent of the BPM / customization. It’s amazing how much lint you pick up in software over years of use that no longer apply or are now in the new version.
FYI - I just described every product I have worked with for the last 30+ years. That’s one consistent aspect of software and business - change.
I love the cloud and would not go back on Premise but be aware: You will have to re-buy all of your licenses at a great expense if you move to the cloud and later determine you need to take things back in-house.
