Have you considered developing inside talent across your groups to do some of the development?
It may keep people more in tune with the software’s capabilities and timelines for development.
For example at my company(almost 2 months into epicor) most of our senior management team, and our planning and mfg engineering departments understand the basics of BAQs, EDD, and will get dashboard training in the near future. That basically covers a large part of the reporting features which allows our groups to easily make their own reports without having to burden our IT group.
Between myself(manufacturing engineer), and our IT department(consisting of IT manager and a programmer) we are just now getting into customizations and BPMs which covers the rest of our development needs
I’m not sure what the size of your company is and the scope of your epicor enviroment. Our case study is likely propped up by the fact we are a relatively small company (<100 employees) and we are a single company and site.