Best Practice Guide Overview

Epicor Kinetic Warehouse - Best Practice Guide

Getting Started

Epicor Kinetic Warehouse (EKW) is a mobile application designed to provide a mobile Warehouse Management System (WMS) and shop floor execution functionality to Epicor Kinetic. The application leverages a RESTful services model to connect directly to the back-office business logic offering real time access to live data and transactions. All transactions processed by EKW are updated directly to Kinetic.

The purpose of this guide is to provide best practice advice and guidance to Epicor Kinetic Warehouse (EKW) customers for administering and managing EKW in their environment.

Releasing new versions of EKW to your production environment

Epicor Kinetic Warehouse is available for download from the Google Play Store and also available by .apk file download from the BISCIT Product Portal. It is strongly recommended that you test any new release of EKW against your Pilot or Test Epicor environment prior to releasing to your production environment.

The below outlines the recommended approach for managing your EKW environment.

Use staged rollout of new EKW versions

It is strongly recommended all new versions of EKW are tested to ensure the new version supports all the required business functions prior to being released to your production environment.

️ Important note: It is standard Google Play Store functionality that the application will download to your device with the “auto-update” setting enabled. It is not recommended and should be disabled for EKW. Auto updating into your production environment is not considered best practice since you cannot validate or test the new version of the software prior to being released to your production environment.

Below are 3 options provided that will allow you to achieve staged rollouts.

1. Mobile Device Management (MDM) approach (recommended)

Use MDM software to manage devices. This will allow you to have complete control over the versions in your production environment. An MDM approach will give you:

1. The ability to update a subset of device(s) to an updated version of EKW to validate the new version in your environment. Once testing has been successfully completed, the MDM will allow you to publish the update to your remaining devices.

2. The ability to take advantage of the built in EKW support for MDM parameters like server URL and licence code thereby eliminating the need to enter these details on each device.

3. Ability to roll back to a previous version if required.

4. Ability to take advance of many other benefits and functionality available in the specific MDM of your choice.

️ There are many MDM solutions on the market including cloud options which provide a very cost effective way of managing your companies device fleet.

️ Please note, EKW will be updated to the Google Play Store monthly. This release will be available from the BISCIT Product Portal as an .apk download 2 weeks prior to being available on the Google Play Store.

2. Manual approach

By turning off auto update on your EKW devices you can manually upgrade devices as needed. While this is safer than the auto-update approach, there are some reasons why this may not be the best approach including.

1. EKW settings (roaming) are set per version and manual rollouts might result in different versions on your devices which may end up with inconsistent settings across your fleet.

2. It can be time-consuming and error prone.

Maintain the same settings across all devices

It is recommended that the entire fleet of devices be on the same version of EKW. It is important to note that later versions of EKW may add additional settings. New versions will inherit a copy of the settings from the previous versions, but changes to settings in later versions will not impact devices running older versions of EKW.

By following this best practice you will ensure consistency of EKW’s settings across the fleet.

1. Use Roaming settings

A user with Security Manager privileges can select an empty UD table in Epicor Database to be used to save all configured setting options. Once the UD table is selected and saved a Security Manager can select and modify settings that will be applied to all EKW devices connecting to that Epicor instance.

️ Important note: Roaming settings are saved per EKW version. New versions will inherit a copy of the settings from the previous versions, but changes to settings in later versions will not impact devices running older versions of EKW.

2. Maintain the same EKW version across all devices

To ensure the settings are consistent across all user devices, it is imperative that the same EKW version is maintained on all devices.

Use of MDM software is recommended to help maintaining the same EKW version on multiple devices.

Use the BISCIT Product Portal

️ If you require access to the Product Portal it can be obtained by logging a support request with Epicor Support.

Using multiple versions of EKW may cause an inconsistent experience for users.

The BISCIT Product Portal provides customers with the ability to see which version (or versions) are in use across the fleet. It also provides additional features and information such as:

• release notes

• ability to manage registrations of all licensed devices

• .apk files for all released versions of EKW

• ability to tag devices for ease of device identification