We are evaluating using EDA for general reporting, financial reporting budgeting and forecasting. We currently have QLIK setup on a very large financial dataset. The downsides of QLIK are that we need to build each dataset, the amount of system code that needs to be generated to properly load the dataset and the complexity of creating visualizations that are beyond basic of the data.
While the sales demos look slick, I would like to hear real world experiences (don’t confuse sales pitches with reality).
Ideally, we are interested in:
Financial reporting. We currently use XLConnect.
Budgeting and Forecasting
Sale, Material and Production
How difficult is it to modify the dataset? Can we easily pull in additional Epicor fields not included in the out of the box dataset? Can we pull in UD fields?
Can we link external data, such as spreadsheets and other databases?
What skill level is needed to build the reports and graphics? Demos always show the easy ones. Then you try to build visuals that work for your business and you find you either can’t do them or you need a programmer level person to own it.
How is the performance? Has anyone tried to pull in millions of financials records?
Thanks! I notice @MikeGross offered a user to user session and @lindsayc hit roadblocks with her exec team. Thanks in advance!
The quick answer to this is that EDA works as advertised - if you’ve set your data up perfectly to match the models and visualizations that work best in EDA. Go to Phocas Software’s website and check them out. Also, get a login for the support site - or it’s the User group - I forget. There is more stuff to learn/see out there and the documentation for the product is pretty good. Just remember some of it is not for Epicor users because of the licensing/setup/etc. of the relationship.
As for specific questions you asked -
The financial reporting piece is almost ready. I’m waiting on the installation to our ‘site’ presently.
Budgeting and forecasting - not like a proper software package that handles what-if scenarios (allowing for value changes and write back to the Database kind of stuff) but you bring in the budget as a separate data source and add it to the model for the comparison models - works fine.
Sales/Materials/Production - easy enough. just get the data the way your company likes it and tweak the model a little.
Dataset - really, it’s a stack of SQL queries that runs on a schedule within a nice little app. The queries have a little bit of special syntax, but we’ve modified a lot of them to our taste very easily. As for Other data or fields - Yes and Yes. Pretty much any OLE/ODBC compliant data source is fair game, as well as spreadsheets, delimited files and the like.
External Data - see previous answer.
Skill levels - SQL/DB type skills are required to work the datasets and construct/alter the data models. Any user with Excel Pivot table, Qlickview, or other tool experience will have an easier time on the visualizations, but most users take to it pretty well. You can build and save favorites - so most users will rely on IT to build things for/with them and add them to their favorites.
Performance - we’re not at ‘millions’ but it’s an engine that churns your data into the ‘cubes’, so that takes some time. But loading the data into the visualizations is super quick for our amount of data. I don’t expect google-level performance but we’re fully pleased with it.
@MikeGross Thanks for the detailed response. It seems you are happy with the solution. If you don’t mind, I have some follow-up questions.
“if you’ve set your data up perfectly to match the models and visualizations that work best in EDA”. This statement piques my interest. When we went live in E9 in 2013, we did not have a finance team. Thus, the financial implementation was an afterthought and we are still struggling to overcome some of them. Do you have examples of your data not lining up and what you did to make EDA work with that data?
Is financial reporting not ready due to being a separate phase on your project or is Phocas working out bugs on their end? We are hoping EDA can be our financial reporting tool.
Can you put a number on the percent of effort that is IT vs Functional Lead (with decent to great Ecel skills). Maybe the percent is different pre go-live vs post.
Lining up the data - I really mean more along the lines of of the fact that everyone uses Epicor a different way, therefore the data might not line up with the delivered EDA models/scripts. You just have to think it through, change the EDA scripts as needed, alter the models accordingly and have a go at it. They provide a lot, but you have to flavor it for your usage.
Financials - Phocas and Epicor’s team have been working on making sure all the coolness of EDA can apply to the Epicor GL model - think calendars, books, fiscal years and periods, intercompany accounts, allocations, unposted versus posted, etc… it’s going to be a complicated SQL script (or a bunch of them) and some interesting rules in the models. I’ve got an appointment on Monday to get the new scripts and work with Epicor’s team to flesh out any other bugs. So yes - Phocas and Epicor were working on things, and now I have to work on things, and then my controllers can shape the ‘reports’ to their needs.
Effort ratio - good question. We’re a small shop and I don’t have anyone to work on these independently except for my controllers. So all the other data (sales/production/HR/etc.) must be done by me and one other on my team. But I’m good at getting them to map out what they want, negotiate with them what can and cannot happen, find the data in Epicor and building scripts - so it’s pretty easy as far as I’m concerned.
not a replacement, and according to Vaibhav Vohra – Chief Product Officer at Epicor - “Grow is an example of the option-ability of Epicor.” I know, I think he just made that shit up. But he used the word like three times referring to Grow, other BI tools, and KBMax not being a replacement for the Configurator but part of the “option-ability”…
he mentioned, for example - Grow will not have the Financial Reports thing that EDA has.
Would you be available for a Q&A about your experience with EDA with a small team next week? Respecting your time, I would like to keep it to 30 minutes. Thank you and I understand if not possible.
If you are looking to display anything close to real-time, beware. The nature of how EDA gets and refreshes it’s data isn’t really made to refresh in increments of seconds or minutes.
True. I see it like this - BAQs, Dashboards, and EDD are all “real time” tools. Anything outside of Epicor can be close to real-time, and anything designed to consume large datasets is purely “after the fact” analysis.
