“On-prem vs Cloud” also gets more complex as there is multiple variations of “Cloud”. The two most common are:
Hosted Cloud - Where Epicor or a third party runs the cloud servers. Backups, upgrades, etc are all handled by the third party and you have no access to the server backend. Plus some other limitations. You’re also at their mercy on upgrade cycle.
Self Hosted - This is basically “On-prem in the cloud” where you run the cloud servers yourself.
I’ve experienced all three and prefer Self Hosted Cloud or On-prem. Unless you’re a small company and don’t have the team to manage the server or just want to outsource those tasks, Hosted Cloud is too restrictive for my tastes.
I find usually the report printing windows are good candidates to expose users to Kinetic gradually. They don’t affect day to day much, they are small in scope, and have a clearly defined workflow to them. I would start by enabling Kinetic there and see where that goes.
I just want to thank everyone who has responded for the warmth & understanding. I worried I was walking into a situation where Epicor loyalists would dunk on me with the vitriol of jilted lovers – but that was clearly unwarranted.
I hope the return to JobScope will be the solution we need, but I’m definitely realistic enough to see that there is no insignificant chance that we are kicking the can down the road 18-36 months.
Having had no particular allegiance to Epicor prior to posting this, I’m currently of the mind that if & when we do go looking for an alternate solution that we should evaluate what Epicor is then without letting the current experience weigh too heavily.
It’s a credit to all of you that I will come away from this posting much more knowledgeable about the issues we faced & aware there are legit experts right in our geographic neck of the woods that we could take a run at headhunting in order to ensure that another crack at this with an up-to-snuff Kinetic has a great chance at succeeding in 2025.
I’ll check back on the thread any time I get a message it is updated, so please don’t mistake this message for a sign-off. Much more of a sincere thank you.
I’ll still be around no plans on leaving this forum. I cut my teeth on Epicor and couldn’t have made my career what it is without the fine people here who have helped me learn.
I realize I’m replying just a little too late, but I’ll put in my 2¢ anyway…
Management commitment is definitely important, but for my implementation the only thing really hanging that up was user buy-in and training. Upper management tried to keep it on track, asking for regular progress updates. It was understood that most customizations including BPMs, reports, and screen customizations would come over time after we went live.
Middle-managers were somewhat weak in making their employees take time for training, though. However, employees were also frequently making excuses, not completing assigned self-training, and generally pushing back against every little thing Epicor did differently from our previous ERP. I personally had to schedule weekly one-hour trainings for each department and attend each them myself as well to make sure questions and answers got “translated” correctly between our users, using terminology from our previous ERP and unique business processes, and our consultants, using more ERP-agnostic and Epicor-specific terminology. I had to frequently talk our users out of requesting customization after customization after customization and insist that their business procedures WILL change and they WILL learn it. “There’s no reason you HAVE to do it the old way, so you WILL learn how to do it this way! This is your job now.” I never went as far as to mention what would happen if they don’t learn it, but I think it was eventually understood.
Our implementation also took about 18 months, though probably closer to 24. I got involved in August 2019, and we went live November 1, 2020, but they had already been working on it for months before I was brought on. Epicor is a decent fit for our business all-in-all, though I think honestly my company is still a bit small to have tried tackling such a complicated implementation (about 40 employees in the US, 20 in the Netherlands who actually just went live this November 1). Much of the pushback from employees was about not having time to do the trainings and their regular job because we had no redundant staff in many departments. As others have pointed out, of course, though, Epicor won’t be a good fit for everyone.
I can’t imagine Epicor not being able to work for just about any company.
The database table structure all seems to be there.
A good 3rd party consultant is mandatory, & the onus is on the customer to make good use of them, when the meter is running, otherwise it’s like lighting money on fire. But going it alone is worse.
Your own IT people, who are familiar with your data is key. They’re the ones who should do the extraction from the old system, data validation & massaging, & loading into the new system. Hugely important.
Some of the biggest & most impactful decisions have nothing to do with Epicor’s features, & can make of break the implementation.
We did lots of customizing, but the best customizations added to Epicor’s tables, rather than modifying them. Same goes with the out of the box screens.
One of the most profound things to understand with ERP systems is that not one of them is useable out of the box. The company they are configured for, doesn’t exist. You must make them work for you.
Almost 100% of the time, an application bug is actually a misconfigured & misunderstood feature.
For what it’s worth, before jumping to this side of the desk, I spent the first 30 years of my career working for software companies ( database, erp & development tools ). Background included programming, sales support, sales, sales management, international marketing with a bit of consulting.
There are many contributing factors to implementations going south. Lack of Executive commitment is top 5. Oversold capabilities, solutions looking for problems, lack of user enthusiasm to learn the new platform. Another is consultants, IT & admins too interested in the technology and not solving the business problem. But the largest, which I’ve witnessed over and over again is sabotage of functionality.
Meaning, the implementations first reaction is to bend the software to their existing process instead of understanding of the software’s functionality and process. The customizations start and never end. Or often cut off other functionality of the software due to a changed process. It also makes it tough to upgrade later releases of the software due to massive customization. ( That being said, the Epicor architecture of protecting customizations from the base package is awesome ). The better approach is to go live with as few customizations as possible, then prioritize customizations on processes not meeting needs.
My first jump to the IT side of the desk was an on prem implementation. I joined the implementation about half way through. They had a list of 280 requirements for customizations. I drug my heels as much as I could with addressing the customizations. That along with having to learn the platform and implement a new eCommerce platform at the same time, made it easy to put customizations lower in the prioritization list. The go live was a bit hectic, due to several factors ( lack of users taking education seriously before implementation ).
If I remember correctly, our time of order out the door was in by 10:00 out same day. In the first couple of weeks, it slipped to 48 hours out the door, but even that settled down after a couple of weeks. Once everyone understood how the software flowed ( a couple of months ), the customizations melted away to about 20 to 30 changes. Some small some large, nothing significant.
Granted we had a couple of unique processes, but most everything was basic manufacturing, stocking and shipping product. I thoroughly enjoyed being on the side of the desk where the rubber met the road.
A couple of other items really caught my attention. The company was a fairly small manufacturing company. They had been purchased by a company about 10 times their size. There goal was to grow this unit, which we did over the next 3 years - doubled in fact. There were certain individuals who simply could not let go of the past, couldn’t trust the software and felt they had to do everything manually. In essence, most were able to grow, there were others that could not.
Not saying any reason listed had to do with the abandonment of your project. Just sharing my own experiences.
We went through this exact same thing. Worked with Epicor for almost two years before realizing it just wasn’t capable of what we needed.
After lurking and seeing serveral similar posts, it is starting to appear that Epicor’s business model is to not provide a trial, so you are forced to pay and work with it. Sunk cost fallacy encourages you to continue spending money, hoping you can get it working, before finally abandoning the project (typcially having to get legal experts involved due to shady contract practices)
It’s hard, and the lost $400k is painful, but leaving Epicor was undoubtedly for the best.
I do not know of 1 legitimate ERP vendor that provides a free trial. Even if they did, the majority are so complex that you would never get anywhere. If a vendor told me that I could demo their product, I would not even know where to begin. I would end up staring at my computer screen for a week and then say it wasn’t good.
I know when I vetted Epicor for purchase, the sales team said they would provide a demo of ANYTHING we asked, out of the box or not. We never did because the business did not want to detail out their requirements, they just wanted the system to “do” what they asked. I have never seen an implementation fail because of the software, every time it is because the business did not want to do the work up front to make it successful.
This picture is a bit blurry, but we have a Go-Live and International Go-Live constantly, without any problems. Because the backing comes from the top. We invest in processes, procedures and at a previous place even had a Corporate Trainer who travels the world and trains and retrains people on Epicor 24/7.
Also - Using Epicor out of the Box 99.9% of the time is what we push for. Customization is dead-last and ONLY if it is needed by the Process, we don’t do it for saving you 2-3 clicks, we do it if mandated by Government or Business Requirement. All the nice stuff like Quick Searches and so on can come later.
We have 3 Environments, I picture only our Lumber and Construction Division. Our Chinese Division isn’t in the photo.
TL;DR its simple, you just have to have the right people.
We did our Australia Go-Live during COVID with 0 Travel and all over MS Teams.
We maintain 3 Environments, 3 DEV, 3 TST, 3 TRN, 3 PRD, 3 Bartender, 3 QuickShip, 3 this and that and this and that. Load Balancers etc…
NONE of our Custimzations are hard-coded. I can give you any of my Customizations it’ll work in ANY Environment with any database.
We are Publicly Traded so we have more Audit Risk.
We have 12,000 employees, and our database is 1.2TB so you can imagine when we upload to Epicor we cant even FTP it. Dealing with Intercompany, Centralized AR/AP and Multi-Company in its own is tough.
Invest in your Team and send them to Conferences.
If I can be of Service to anyone, DM me, happy to help, but your CEO has to be on-board.
Also DM me if you want to see some Processes and Examples, I cant share them on the public forum but im Happy to show you the depth a decision such as should we use Single Book or Multi-Book goes through. It goes through a lengthy CAB Committee. Its all documented. If the entire Team won the lottery tomorrow, someone else can find every single thing we did. Change Management.
“Don’t Customize for the user. Customize for the Process.” For example… Why are people Customizing and putting Logos on “INTERNAL” reports before they even get the Invoice, BOL and Packing Slip Right? Who cares about a logo on a Job Traveler, no one cares! its crowded, if anything make the Traveler cleaner - get rid of stuff, not bigger.
What else… We need to abide by SOX… So our Menu Security has to be SPOTLESS. For example we have people who need Vendor Maintenance, but can’t change the Payment Type etc…
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to say goodbye to this thread. It’s been a wild ride full of twists, turns, and enough discussion to fill a stable, but it’s time to retire this old nag. Let’s give it a round of applause and move on to greener pastures.
no plans on leaving this forum. I cut my teeth on Epicor and couldn’t have made my career what it is without the fine people here who have helped me learn.
