Alternative ERPs

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XKCD is a national treasure, there truly is one for everything.

To be fair, while all ERP’s are terrible, they are all terrible in their own unique ways. Always verify really obvious basic core requirements aren’t totally inappropriate for their job, because those do exist in the wild. I’ve worked with one ERP that stored all decimal values as SQL float. Super fun when GL balances move around in unexpected ways. Also had a verification step during journal posting which applied WITH(NOLOCK), which at least only caused solvable problems.

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22

Native UI form customization is really, really straightforward. You add the field to the record type, organize the field into the group, and then it places it on the form. It’s not a drag/drop interface like Epicor, but rather configuration based with a UI to support it. This makes the 99% of UI customization very easy to manage and deploy. The ‘downside’ if you’ll call it that (and I did at first, since I was used to the dense Epicor forms and ability to place fields wherever) is it will fit the fields to the form according to index position (shown by the arrow there) and whether there is a column break or no. There is no weirdness when doing this kind of customization and it’s extremely stable and straightforward.

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There is also a whole suite (no pun intended) of developer tools to do ‘real’ development. For instance, I built a whole-a$$ Trello-like board recently with real-time updates utilizing something called a Suitelet, which is completely server-side code to in this case render a form, a ‘client script’ which is a different type of script loaded into the browser (which handles all the custom HTML/CSS/JS work), and a script type called ‘restlets’ to perform REST calls from the browser to the server to execute custom code (i.e. load incremental data, update data, etc.).

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So, you’re really not limited by a tool set, particularly if you want those heavily customized UIs like you do.

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23

As a former Epicor On-Prem User, what are your thoughts on Epicors ‘SaaS Only’ move?

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24

For $24,000 USD per year, people aren’t paying for the UI. They are paying for the feeds behind it.

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25

I think there is a lot I don’t know about a lot of industries, particularly ones with strict requirements (thinking aerospace/defense/etc.) so take my opinion with that in mind. If you have strict requirements for this, I’d talk to someone who knows (not me).

I was worried about it when we left. Before, I had ‘control’ over everything, but with that came a lot of technical overhead with no real strategic value.

For us, the move to SaaS was a blessing. I don’t’ worry about the database, infrastructure, backup/dr stuff. I simply work on business value-add stuff.

The SaaS model eliminates basically ALL the nonsense I had to deal with on-prem, particularly regarding integration. I had 1 issue early on with integrating AWS SFTP endpoints into NetSuite (the AWS SFTP cipher suite needed to be downgraded to work with the accepted suites that NS had) which I felt smug about for a little bit, but that’s the only niche issue I felt like on-prem had more configuration control over.

I was very used to database-first mentality, particularly for bulk data integration. Moving to a code-first approach felt ‘slower’, but ultimately, it’s been really nice. Instead of pumping data into UD tables direct to the SQL table (not recommending, btw), I pull a file from an SFTP site, have something called a Map/Reduce script to read the file, break into key/value pairs, and then process those pairs in parallel. It’s definitely slower (than dumping data into SQL), but somewhat akin to DMT uploads (although those process synchronously, I think). There is no concept of writing to the database without the APIs in NS. There is a SQL-like language called SuiteQL that is sufficient for reading but cannot write to the db.

The big excitement with Epicor before I left was Functions, i.e. user defined REST endpoints. Moving to NS, that model has been around for a long time. If you’re comfortable with JS, it’s easy as all script types in NS use JS.

User management is easier in SaaS, for me.

To summarize, what felt like control was actually a heap of risk on my shoulders. I am very happy to have been freed up from the management of the on-prem model to being 100% focused on things that add tangible value to the org. Your mileage may vary, but happy to answer other questions if I can.

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26

Nice write-up. Usually for me these things are one and done, I setup the Infrastructure and don’t have to look at it for 5-7yrs unless it needs updates of course.

The black-box of not being able to write complex logic, because not everything in Epicor is as well documented as MRP Technical Reference guide.

When you mark an Order “On Credit Hold” there is quite some logic and triggers that happen that you don’t see in the Trace, but looking into the .dll you can make sense of it all.

For example in SaaS you can’t see the logic behind Calculated_ Fields. Because True SaaS means there is no Server.7z you can download and understand it.

Most of the code we share here, wasn’t figured out by luck. We usually looked behind the curtains, and copied what Epicor was doing, and tweaked it :slight_smile:

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27

I’m curious what the typical/recommended method would be for offloading all your data from Epicor into another ERP, let’s assume you’re already in Cloud so can’t just grab the data out of SQL.

I’ve been tooling around with a dashboard that exfiltrates data in DMT format so that it could be directly loaded into another environment from the export, something like that might be adaptable if another solution doesn’t exist.

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28

Sounds so nefarious!
hack hacking GIF

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29

I think Epicor might not be so enthusiastic about a 1-click “take your data and go” button, so maybe it is… :wink: Defeating vendor lock-in one dashboard at a time!

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30

BTW: If you haven’t seen Kung Fury, do yourself a favor.
KUNG FURY Official Movie [HD]

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31

I got hooked on the intro! damn you! i know what im doing after work.

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32

For a price; Epicor will give you your data.

Throw Away Make It Rain GIF

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33

With 208 tables hidden from you – despite it being your data :slight_smile:

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34

I assume for a premium price they’ll even give you those tables.

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35

I can imagine the corporate thought process goes something like “Well, if you did this yourself, you’d need to go back on prem, so let’s just charge you the nominal amount for the move to on-prem first.. then, you can pull your own data out of SQL! Oh, but you don’t want to do all that? Well, we can still give you your data, we’ll just need to charge you all those licensing costs plus labor.”

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36

Pretty wild, isn’t it. Sadly they aren’t the only SaaS company to do that. Most charge a premium to get your data out.

It’s not really your data anymore. They all (not just Epicor) say it is. But it’s not.

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37

I wish I was kidding about this. One platform we use that’s SaaS. The fee to get your data out is your current yearly maintenance fee times the number of years you’ve been a customer. So say it’s $100K/yr. We’ve been a customer for 15 years. To export out data it would be $1.5 million.

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38

Most expensive cp ./yourdatabase.bak /transfermedia/yourdatabase.bak ever! Well, not really. That pricing structure is an indicator that they need to untangle your data from everyone else’s data in a shared database.

Note to all the future ERP founders: If it touches financial information, use distinct data stores for distinct access scopes. One database per client. No exceptions.

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39

@Aaron_Moreng One last question out of curiosity, how are the upgrades and maintenance windows, and how is Support?

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Upgrades and maintenance have been a breeze, like I literally don’t have to do anything. In Epicor, each update is an anxiety invoking activity (uh oh, the ENTIRE AR Invoice form broke, again, etc.) but I’ve not had to lift a finger for the upgrades and maintenance.

Basically, they send me an email (and I acknowledge the update window assigned to me or move it via an administrator message) telling me what is planned and when. They pick off hours (very early or late on the weekend, typically), and it just happens. I’ve seen a couple times where they rescheduled due to some reason, but I’m never involved (nor is anyone from my company) on it.

The biggest change was that ‘it just works’ when upgrades happen. On the rare occasion where something doesn’t work, which I have yet to experience, there is very quick resolution. I’ve heard sometimes ppl saying something random isn’t working, but that’s usually related to some sort of service degradation in the data center their environment is hosted in (i.e. not usually widespread).

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For support, I’ve put in a couple of true support tickets for weird stuff, like a complicated SQL (in my case SuiteQL) query that was running like garbage suddenly. They were friendly but not very helpful on the deep technical stuff. The issue ended up resolving itself, so I’m sure it was something very odd.

Most of us use an implementation and support partner. These guys, if you pick the right one (just like in the Epicor world) are worth their weight in gold for providing support and escalation. Once you learn the system it’s very much a pleasure to work in and not buggy (sans certain known features like ‘copy to account’ to move things between environments, which has been broken since its inception, but not a critical roadblock).

But really, there have been very few (maybe like 2 or 3 support with NS tickets) since we’ve been on since 2023. I would say with confidence it’s much more ‘stable’ than my experience with Epicor. Again, just my 2 cents, but every Epicor upgrade felt like a business risk and about half the time it was. These upgrades happen under your nose, and I don’t even think twice about them.

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