Any thoughts on its strengths and weaknesses?
Brett
We just finished our “Live” deployment, which essentially is a deployment on our live data via a replication server and data warehouse. The product is very powerful and provides some impressive graphical and tabular views of your data. It runs off of SQL data cubes which are referred to as content packs. We are just starting to explore these and have found a lot of discrepancies against our normally reported data. I suspect we need to make modifications to the rules generating certain measures within the cubes.
The installation was moderately challenging but you can get Epicor to help out. We installed it ourselves but had an EPM guru come out for training (3 days). The cost was reasonable and he is very knowledgeable.
We have had our EPM license for years, as we had been a CorVu user (or not) from years back. There are certainly other BI options out on the market so if you have unique ways of looking at your data I would consider researching them to see if they might be worth consideration. The value added component in EPM is the content packs so if you want to look at things “your way” then the value is diminished. Note, the content packs can be modified if you have the correct licensing.
There is a session at Insights focused on Epicor BI offerings and there may be some information available on future directions and product demos.
Keith
We are just starting to use it internally now as well. I can say that it requires a LOT of tinkering to get it to present your data in a way useful to your company. The content packs are a great start as Keith mentioned, but we use the configurator and there is no content pack that includes the configurator data set - so we had to build our own data tables in order to link the configurator data in the cubes.
The other obstacle is that in the organization of the cubes, you cannot have two ‘unrelated’ data sets on the same visualization - for example you cannot graph quote and order values because you cannot combine two cubes in the same graph. You can have two graphs(using two different cubes) on the same canvas(dashboard) and that may be fine for your folks.
In all of our research we’ve determined that the content packs will be best used to learn and discuss what visualizations we really want and how to organize them. So we’ve done that part and almost finished building cubes the way we want them. Building cubes from scratch is a skillset most small IT departments don’t have. And the EPM tools are nice once you get your head around them - and I think they are easier to use than Microsoft Analysis services for beginner/intermediate BI people.
If you have good BI/Cube skillsets and complicated data, you will probably be better served using something else like Microsoft BI, Tableau, or Qlikview with large amounts of ‘free’ support on the internet. Finding EPM talent is tricky/expensive.
Mike
Thanks for the responses folks. Will consider this as we move forward.
Cheers
Brett