Anyone using Epicor Commerce Connect with Configurators?

Epicor ERP 10
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1

Hello,

Our company wants to create a customer+dealer portal. They are concerned about maintenance and stability. I have some questions for anyone using ECC:

  • Do you have a webstore I can view?
  • Is your Epicor hosted on their cloud or do you self host?
  • How much customization did it take to get ECC working and looking the way you wanted?
  • How well does ECC work with product configurators?
  • How does ECC handle shipping and credit cards?

Greatly appreciate any replies, even from people who decided ECC wouldn’t work for them.

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My current company does not use ECC, but my previous did before getting bought out by a bigger company. They’re no longer on Epicor so no site to see. They were on-prem for Epicor not hosted but the website was hosted on a cloud service. Marketing controlled the website/ECC integration and I think he made it sound harder than it really needed to be but he kept us at a distance unless he needed something.

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Well if a marketing person was able to maintain it, it sounds easier then configurators at least. Do you happen to remember how long it took to implement?

Thanks for responding @Randy!

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Marketing used a consultant to help set it all up, but being OCD, he kept tweaking it. It took about 6-months to get the initial test site and another 4ish to finally get it Live (see note on OCD :wink: ).

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5

Evan,

You can visit dotit.com to purvue an ecc connection to Epicor. The site is Magento (hosted in the cloud) to a on premise Epicor implementation.

ECC does the job. There are a lot of configurations to wrap your head around but they do work and are accessible. You just need to account for the learning curve.

We still use this in production today. However, we are migrating away from ECC, ONLY BECAUSE we have a VERY UNIQUE requirement that ECC should never address. Meaning, I’m saying I support the ECC bridge and the product manager Adrian to the nines. They have a great product and it does the job.

Where we separate is that we offer branded materials that can only be purchased by branded customers. In essence, only owners of franchises for a brand can log into the branded eCommerce site. Thus we have 87 different websites for our enterprise customers. ECC doesn’t support this, but neither does anyone else. We were able to get this to work via scripts that ran on Magento after sync’s, but as we grow, we need to absolutely control the whole process and this means abandoning ECC. If I was anywhere else, I would keep this product.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Steve

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Hi Even,

We are currently re-implementing ECC on Magento 2 after Magento 1 got to end of life and became a security concern.

I would be hesitant to comment on the state of ECC now as it looks like it is a fast evolving product and we are 3 major releases behind at the moment.

One thing we definitely had issues with however was the configurators. we had multiple custom methods that had to run server side as they were retrieving data for the configurator, even with <1ms between our web server and Epicor it made the configurators unusably slow, again this was on magento 1 with an early version of ECC so things may have changed now. I see there is now a web configurator extension tab in the admin console so it looks like they may have completely reworked how it functions.

The other thing to consider if the stylization of the configurator, on our early version it was just an iframe of the same configurator window you see in Epicor. This isn’t exactly customer friendly especially when surrounded by the modern magento UI. Again it may be something that has been re-worked now but this ultimately drove us to use a third party configurator which we are customizing to work with ECC

Hope this helps
Jordan

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The site looks nice. Thanks for responding, its really good to know that you had a positive experience with the product manager.

So one thing that isn’t clear to me is what parts Epicor does and what parts the customer does. Did you guys design the website and host it or did Epicor do that for you?

When you say “You just need to account for the learning curve.” what kind of skills are needed? Is a mechanical engineer with a little programming experience going to be able to set it up and maintain it or would we need an IT department?

What kind of built in support is there for credit cards and shipping options?

Thanks so much for taking the time to give me your experience.

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Woah, I don’t know how long until you complete the upgrade, but if the configurators still work like that it will be a deal breaker I think. Over 90% of our stuff is highly configured, and the configurators are pretty complex.

If you get further along and can share anything about how the configurators work please do - I am afraid we are going to get sold a product that can’t do what we want, or provide an acceptable experience while doing it.

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You do not need a programmer if you are sticking to the basics of Magento.

  • You create the parts in Epicor and mark them as web saleable. ECC creates and / or updates the part in Magento. Because of unique things we do, we don’t port categories, thus our Marketing team created categories in Magento and tied the created product to the categories
  • You create the Customers and “Contact” in Epicor and mark them as Web User. ECC then creates those accounts in Magento
  • After all this is set Magento then pushes orders into Epcior at the time the order is placed
  • On your defined schedule Epicor through ECC updates information with regards to the Order.

From start to finish, including having to learn Magento & Epicor our implementation lasted 6 months. This also included getting Epicor live. If Epicor had been in place I suspect we could have done the implementation in a couple of months.

On an ongoing basis we have a part time resource for the administration of the portal in Magento.

Because of unique requirements we have for our site, I have a developer on retainer and the price is right. If you’re interested you can call Dot It at 817.275.7714.

Regards,
Steve

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Good, I think management is looking for something regular office workers (sales, marketing, accounting) can use day to day with only rare need for a consultant. I happen to have some ability with c#, javascript and html/css but they don’t have any position for someone with IT/programming skills.

We haven’t pulled the trigger on ECC yet, but if we do I will keep that offer in mind.

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We are still struggling to find an example website that uses configurators. Epicor gave us links to a few websites but none of them had configured products as far as I can tell.

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Epicor did a feature on Ranier Tent’s Configurator/ECC setup at Insights a couple of years ago.
I don’t think anyone from that team is on here or else I’d tag them directly (and hopefully they don’t mind me sharing a link to their site), but you can see the configurator here: https://rainiertents.com/commercial-tent-configurator.html

It’s certainly better than an iframe with the same internal configurator, but it definitely still has that Epicor feel to it.

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Hmm, interesting that it was considered good enough to be featured, I don’t think we would find that acceptable for external users.

Would it be correct to assume that the Epicor Web Access configurators are essentially the same thing that ECC will display?

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Yes, it is my understanding that the Web Configurator is what gets published to ECC.

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Thanks for your help Jason.

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Apparently there is the old EWA style configurators like the Ranier Tent and then some newer thing called Epicor Web Configurators that is based on AngularJS and typescript/. Do you know anything about that?

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Do you have documentation or snapshots of this technology? Where did you see this?

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No visual yet, heard about it over the phone during ECC discovery call. Didn’t make it sound secret but I can’t find much info on it. :thinking:

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Found mention of it in the 10.2.300 feature release document:

image
image.png685Ă—595 68 KB

Epicor Web Configurator
You can mark configurators as Epicor Web Configurator (EWC) and deploy them to Epicor Web.
When you enter a configurator record and set it to EWC, all Client processing is moved to the web and the
existing Server side logic remains in the Epicor ERP application. For example, if you launch the EWC configurator
from within a sales order, you open an iFrame and hand off control to the EWC team. The EWC team will deal
with any Client side events and make the appropriate calls to the server for Keep When rules, part swaps, and
Server side User Defined (UD)/Lookup Methods. When all is complete, they will call into the Configuration Runtime
10.2.300 49
10.2.300 Feature Highlights 10.2.300 Feature Highlights
service method to save the configuration. The EWC configurators have the ability to apply CSS so your configurators
include a more modern look.
Setting configurators to EWC enables you to use the TypeScript open source programming language that supports
the Kinetic technology used by EWC configurators. You enter TypeScript expressions in the Code Editor as well
Configurator User Defined Methods Maintenance that includes the TypeScript sheet. Use the sheet to create
an expression for a desired user defined method.
In this release, Epicor Web Configurator will support a limited set of UI features. More UI features will be made
available in subsequent releases.
Note You can also enter TypeScript expressions for Dynamic Lists (Configurator Designer).
Note To use Epicor Web configurators you must install the Epicor Configurator 10.2.300 license.
Menu Path: Sales Management > Configurator Management > General Operations > Configurator User Defined
Method Maintenance

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Hi Evan,

Did you manage to find anything there? I’m also evaluating Epicor configurator and ECC and trying to get some examples from our account rep but it’s proving difficult. I’m not sure how they wouldn’t have some examples for people to look at.