What’s New in Release 2023.2 of Kinetic

Release 2023.2 of Kinetic: Made With You, For You

Epicor products are made with you, for you—that’s our promise to our customers. This promise is particularly evident in Release 2023.2 of Kinetic, which has been heavily influenced by the many inspired ideas our customers delivered to us over the last six months. The features in this release focus on improving your day-to-day operations,  streamlining and simplifying processes so that you spend less time planning and more time producing.  

To take advantage of what these features have to offer, contact your CAM to learn about upgrading to the latest release.  

Now, let’s dive into some 2023.2 features you asked for: 

A more connected, data-savvy Epicor 

Data Fabric - Integrating Epicor to Epicor Products with ease.

Connecting our extended solutions takes a new leap forward with the introduction of Data Fabric, an integration framework powered internally by Apache Kafka, built on a highly scalable cloud-native architecture, and hosted as part of the Confluent Cloud in Microsoft Azure.   

With Data Fabric, we do the “heavy lifting”, bringing data from one Epicor product and delivering it to another Epicor product—providing near real-time information across systems, enabling greater enterprise agility, communication, and visibility. 

Results: 

• Creates a one-stop shop to configure and manage integrations
• Offers fast, reliable, and resilient data pipelines, with receipt times within seconds
• Increases security as products connect to Data Fabric, not directly to each other, and are limited to only Data Fabric-related tables

The first integration solution to take advantage of is the Epicor Supplier Portal,  a solution for completely digitising and automating purchase order fulfillment with suppliers. Accuracy issues, inefficient communication and poor order fulfillment tracking are the top challenges Kinetic customers currently face in managing their supplier orders. Many of these challenges occur because the majority of supplier orders today are still processed manually. This leads to strained supplier relationships, and strained customer relationships by extension. 

Supplier Portal now connects Kinetic customers to both their integrated and non-integrated suppliers, creating a “single source of truth” hub and digitising the supplier order process for greater visibility and communication between all parties.  

Results: 

• At least a 75% reduction in implementation costs (from legacy custom BPM implementation)
• Improved communication and supplier experience due to all parties looking to a single source of truth
• A single integration format, with the same endpoints and integration specification for both Portal and integrated suppliers

Connecting Manufacturers with their Data using Grow Business Intelligence

Last year we introduced Epicor Grow, an industry-leading business intelligence solution, for Kinetic users.  With this release, we extend the use of Grow to incorporate more data for greater decision-making and clearer results, including offering Grow for on-premises as well as cloud users. Grow now connects with FP&A, Collaborate, and Quick Ship to serve up your data in more ways and with wider access.  

Results: 

• On-premises Kinetic customers can now access the power of Epicor Grow—allowing them to fully understand, analyse, visualise and ultimately leverage their data
• 75+ data connectors, data transformation, data warehousing, reports, and data visualisation with metrics, charts, graphs, key process indicators (KPIs), and dashboards are all part of our low-/no-code, full-stack business intelligence (BI) platform 

Other Highlights: New Features Driving Operational Excellence

BAQ as a data source for another BAQ 

We know that building a Business Activity Query (BAQ) takes a lot of time and planning. With this feature, we give you some of that time back by enabling you to build sub-BAQs based on the code you already developed for your initial BAQ. This allows for your initial BAQ to be a single source of truth for other BAQs moving forward.   

Results: 

• Saves you time by standardising your initial BAQ—empowering you to build from that template for future BAQs
• Allows mass-editing and corrections to BAQs by making changes only to your source BAQ

Browser-First Mode 

You can now launch Classic UX screens directly from the Browser without having to log into the smart client. This is a great feature to help with user adoption, as you can get the mobility and agility of the Browser UX, while continuing to work with the Classic UX screens. In this release, we’re also completing the optimisation of the top-used screens based on how you work—an initiative we started to roll out in 2023.1.   

Results: 

• Embrace full mobility by being able to work in Kinetic on any device, instead of being dependent on the smart client installation
• Promotes a more seamless transition from Classic to Browser UX by allowing a hybrid working environment between the two views
• Screen optimisation improves data entry flow, with fewer clicks to navigate and less scrolling 

Mass Engineering Change Order (ECO) revision change and checkout

Engineers often need to revise hundreds of parts one by one in order to check them out in the Engineering Workbench. With the brand-new Mass ECO feature, you can now mass-edit your parts list, process a mass checkout, and review these details all on one screen. 

Results: 

• Speeds up the checkout of parts: a multi-step process becomes a single-step process, saving you time.
• Supports your use of Tabulated Drawings by creating the list of parts as a set—you can now mass-edit this set. 

Validate Ship By and Need By dates against a shipping calendar 

Eliminate the possibility of late shipments with our new shipping calendar feature in both Quotes and Orders. Customers can now create a shipping calendar with rules for shipping dates and can limit Ship By and Need By options on quotes and orders based on the rules they put in place.  

Results: 

• No late shipments due to miscommunicated shipment availability dates
• Reduces man hours spent checking and double-checking calendar dates

Production Planning Simplified 

We’ve streamlined the production planning process with a few small tweaks that have a big impact on your day-to-day operations, including: 

• Consolidating the screen changes in this process from 6 to 3—reducing clicks and screen switching
• Adding Material Requirements Planning (MRP) log data to the Planning Workbench, reducing the need to switch to MRP logs to find the data you need
• Better search capability added to Job Status Maintenance screen—you can now allocate and reserve in this screen, as it navigates directly to the Fulfillment Workbench where you can automate these allocations through Auto Allocations

Results: 

• With access to more data, MRP can help you look ahead and understand what can be built based on inventory levels, not just what needs to be built to satisfy demand
• The data you need is all in one place
• Jobs get to the floor faster 

Level Up with Release 2023.2 of Kinetic

Already a Kinetic user? The Epicor Services and Support teams are ready to help you upgrade today. Reach out to your Customer Account Manager to get started. 

Learning about the new release of Kinetic for the first time? Visit the latest release page on EpicWeb.  

Daniel Charvoz

Product Marketing Manager

Daniel Charvoz is a Product Marketing Manager at Epicor, where he works on the go-to-market strategy for Epicor's manufacturing ERP solution; Kinetic. He has an MBA from the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, and lives in Minneapolis.

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