External Manufacturing Platform Using Epicor?

We kept running into manufacturing issues that Epicor wasn’t really designed to answer in one place. We built an Excel prototype to bridge the gap, but it’s finally reached its limits. Again.

At this point, we’ve began looking at Azure to run our diagnostic rules and data normalization. This will include things like purchasing, operations, etc. I’ve got a function in the side of Epicor that will handle BOM recursion, as well as several BAQs to bring in initially normalized data sets.

I’m curious if anyone here has gone down a similar path. Not necessarily replacing Epicor, but building an external manufacturing application that uses Epicor as the system of record.

Most of what I’ve found on EpiUsers are really good BAQs, BPMs, dashboards, etc., but I haven’t found many discussions around building a larger platform around Epicor data. If any of you have done this, I’m curious to see what lessons you may have learned or what surprised you.

In preparation for moving to the cloud our overall strategy is try and get our implementation back to ‘vanilla’, leaving only ud fields and bpms.

We have a few customized applications that use UD tables which we are externalizing using Fast API and Python, hosted in Azure.

The external apps are much more functionally rich with the constraints of Epicor and UD tables removed.

All interactions with Epicor are via Rest API, which ensures integration with cloud.