What is our primary use case?
The primary use cases are always in manufacturing, although it's pretty extensive. We use it in a couple of trading and distribution situations, however, its core strength has always been in manufacturing.
How has it helped my organization?
Typical tier 2 products are focused on discrete manufacturing. Although Epicor out of the box is built for discrete manufacturing, certain partners have managed to configure Epicor to handle process manufacturing requirements using Epicor built in tools. There are some unique features especially in the production process control involving the use of a manufacturing order or job. Using the base to achieve the tracking of material and labor/overheads consumption and usage, the manner of entering this information is handled differently using custom screens and in some instance using IoT to obtain the information from the production floor. Some of the industries that it managed to handle are glove manufacturing , codom and plastic films manufacturing processes.
What is most valuable?
In terms of manufacturing and in terms of the configuring of the product to meet a variety of different types of manufacturing requirements, the product works well. It's fairly configurable and fairly powerful.
There's good flexibility within the inbuilt tools such as alerts, business process management, dashboards, and screen customization. You can really get pretty, pretty extensive, and really tweak the product to make it work for process industries.
We have done implementations that tweak the software to actually meet process manufacturing use cases. This this is possible due to the strength of the tools that come along with Epicor, all the inbuilt tools.
What needs improvement?
If you're going to a cloud solution, you need to actually have a workable, practical web UI. Epicor doesn't really have a proper solution there, although they claim they do. However, it's not really popular. In practical terms, very few customers use it. Epicor is very flexible, so customization can get quite extensive. Yet, when you do something like that, on the cloud, it doesn't work well. Perhaps that is the reason many clients who had done those heavy customization can ever move to proper SAAS model.
Right now, it doesn't really have a good cloud story. That said, Epicor 11 is coming out and they claim it's fully web UI. If I were to base it on Epicor 10, it doesn't really have a proper cloud solution. Also once you go fully cloud, the customization capability drops significantly.
Secondly, base on my involvement for 15 years with Epicor, experiencing all major releases. The number of releases has dwindled. Almost nothing really sticks out if I look at the last two releases of Epicor - and my personal opinion is that they're not putting enough investment into R&D.
It's got an inbuilt APS, however, to be honest, I've not seen anyone implement it. It does work. That said, in practical terms, when you have multiple constraints (labor, machines, tools, et cetera.), if you've got these kinds of constraints and you need all three to work harmoniously, then Epicor's scheduler cannot do the job. It looks very nice when you're doing a demonstration, however, it's not practical if you actually try to implement it.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've had been an Epicor using the solution for 15 years as a partner to Epicor, implementing about 20, 25 sites under different roles either as a functional or technical project manager. We acquired quite a number of clients over the 15 years. We started with Epicor 9, then we went to Epicor 10. I have very good experience and knowledge of the product.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I've been through the whole journey with Epicor 9, and then Epicor 10, and now into 11. Epicor 9 was really unstable. Customers cannot get over the fact that they keep on putting a lot of power on the hardware, and just cannot solve the performance issues on Epicor 9.
There's a combination of Progress and Microsoft Stack going on inside there, and that was causing a lot of performance issues. It looks like a very innovative solution at that point in time, yet there are a massive amount of performance issues. When we went to Epicor 10, we moved to a full Microsoft Stack. Still, lots of the stability issues in the early versions of 10 only improved after 10.2.
Version 10.2 seems quite okay. They sort of stabilized everything. I really don't know about other ERP systems, however, when we talk about Epicor's, every time they launch a new release, its tendency is to be quite unstable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution is quite scalable due to the fact that its app servers are scalable. You can scale out pretty well without any issues.
How are customer service and support?
As a partner, I know a little bit more than a client would know. Epicor's support, if I were to rate between one and ten, I would give them probably five.
Sometimes we have problems where we can see, for example, performance problems where the customer has been running for a couple of months and years, and suddenly there is performance degradation. It's a gray area, indirectly Epicor flexible tools causes this problem with badly designed queries which hits the database very badly. No one knows if it is a product issue or if there is something else going on in there. However, Epicor tends to push everything to the customer. It's for the partner to go and solve, and then we have to get a DBA, and then, when we go and dig inside, we actually find some view or store procedure from Epicor is running incorrectly.
They tend to not admit there's a problem with it. Due to that, sometimes the problem just drags on and on and on for months, until you prove to them that their stock procedure is running and causing the problems. The answer at that point is to upgrade to the newer version. It's very frustrating as a former partner and I do emphatize with our client.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
Epicor's setup is complex. If you are new to it, there's an 80% chance of you failing without having somebody who's experienced to guide you, as there are a lot of tools. Even your mindset to approach how to implement the solution is important. If you have the wrong mindset, such as, you think everything can be customized, and you don't manage it carefully, and that leads to a very high chance of failure.
Scope creep and extension of the project, budget, and time and all those sorts of problems appear. Having someone with experience in implementing Epicor will definitely help a new partner who signs on, however, if you attempt to do it yourself, you will really struggle for the first year and to do a decent implementation.
The deployment process takes six to nine months.
What was our ROI?
Generally, customers do see some returns, however, they are not very massive in that sense. For example, they achieve a couple of things in terms of having statutory reporting done in a timely manner every month, doing day-to-day operations.
To me, there are some significant items. I just focus on the manufacturing side, and things like production planning, advance planning, and scheduling, don't achieve ROI.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
In terms of pricing, they run on a concurrent model that is attractive. In our region, people are very price-sensitive and when they offer flexibility, people are pleased. For example, If they have a 20-person license, and I have 50 people, they say that some people can use it occasionally. Other products and solutions may not allow for that.
In terms of new acquisitions, as I'm coming from a partner ecosystem, I find that Epicor can be quite aggressive and will price to win deals. However, be aware that this is a double edge sword, the partner tends to take the risk of quoting low and then hit problems of project overrun and budget overrun. This is where either the partner or client will tend to lose out.
What other advice do I have?
Epicor doesn't have a good story to tell when it comes to the cloud in this region. I am in Malaysia, and, in South East Asia, Epicor still pushes the on-prem solution rather than the cloud solution. That's mainly due also to the fact that it's still very client server-based, rather than web interface or web UI-based.
When considering using and implementing the solution with clients, we help extend a typical ERP with things like robotic process automation or putting a low-code/no-code platform to fully digitize the whole process. In the ERP system, there's still a paper trail going on in most companies, and we don't ever really fully digitize. To me, it's important to look at tools that can extend the whole digital footprint, rather than to just look at a bare ERP system, due to the fact that that's enough. That would be something a new user should keep in mind.
They need to use AI and machine learning in an ERP product in order to enhance it. I don't see very much going on in Epicor. However, I've seen Microsoft do a lot of stuff with their product. Another way to say this is you need to look around and see what other vendors out there can offer and if that is more than what you are getting out of your ERP system. This may not suit everyone's needs.
I'd rate the solution at a six out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
