Hello,
I am just dipping my toes into BAQ and Dashboards. I was wondering if anyone could highlight the key differences between EDD and EDA. From the surface, they look very similar. Do you use one or the other? Do they work together?
Thank you!
Hi Michelle. We are licensed for both, and in my opinion they’re not comparable. EDD is designed for metrics and quick reports. It has some basic filtering abilities. We were not able to use it as a full reporting solution, as it lacks many features we need. Also, certain “features” - like KPI’s - have very limited functionality. The only source you can use for data is BAQs with EDD.
EDA is on a completely different level. I believe it’s a white-labeled version of the BI software created by Phocas (https://www.phocassoftware.com/) and is integrated to pull full Epicor datasets in. You have the option of using other data sources as well.
Honestly, we haven’t found a limit on what it can do. I believe it’s quite a bit more expensive, but the breadth of features made it a good choice for us. The EDA resources Epicor provided for training were top-notch as well. Hope this helps.
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Hi Michelle,
Adding to Chris’s excellent comment, in addition to EDA, Epicor purchased another BI company called Grow. Like EDA, it’s “near” real time.
EDD does have a paid version that does a few more functions (visuals, external data sources, etc.) but like Chris said, the basic version runs on BAQs, which are as real time as your data is - no upload to the cloud.
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Thanks Mark, that’s an important part that I forgot to add - I believe that we had to purchase the “Advanced” version of EDD to use KPIs.
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If you are comfortable writing BAQs to assemble the data you want to display in a graph/report/etc do not expect that ease of use with EDA.
EDA gets its data VIA what they call Syncs. While these Syncs are something someone with SQL skills can create/modify, I think the average user will be limited to what comes out of the box, which, in my experience, is not everything. (No PartTran for example)
I also think calling it near real-time is being generous. These Syncs are intended to be run as scheduled tasks on the server where your data lives. Depending on the number of Syncs you have, and the complexity/duration of them, scheduleing syncs every minute/5 minutes/hour quickly becomes unrealistic.
For us here personally, I tell people the freshest data they can expect from an EDA dashboard/etc is what happened yesterday.
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Welcome Michele!
The acronyms describe the products pretty well EDD is Epicor Data Discovery while EDA is for Epicor Data Analytics.
Think of the difference between tactics and strategy. EDD is tactical, it’s for “right-now” information to get the right people onto the right job so it can ship today. EDA is strategic, helping to point out that jobs for THESE THREE part numbers are taking away resource availablility for TWO OTHER part numbers that although drive much less quantity have vastly greater profitability.
Or something like that. It’s the “in the weeds” view vs, the 35,000-foot view.
We don’t have EDA. From the little time I have spent attempting to use EDD I find it . . . useless. One of the use cases we would have for it is to display small data sets on the home page for certain people.
But there is no way to just add a BAQ on the home page unless the user has BAQ designer rights . I don’t understand this because you shouldn’t need BAQ designer rights just to look at the data. Then if I actually design a dashboard for the data in EDD, it becomes huge with all the padding and takes up way too much room. Maybe there are ways around these issues and I just haven’t spent enough time working with it. I don’t like the dashboard design interface at all.
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Thank you everyone, that was helpful!