I think we made a mistake going with Epicor

Kinetic ERP
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I didn’t like Netsuite for a lot of reasons, I searched for something better. It seemed Epicor would handle our projects and jobs better, and it might, however I feel we’ve taken 3 steps backwards in basic software functionality…

Can’t push info from orders to projects, fields don’t carry over data (start / end dates, labor rates, burden rates, hours, etc etc). Email client is from 1992. No retained email conversations with contacts.
Manual posting / backflushing.

Kinetic bugs - these are making the learning process cumbersome. Why release something that’s not ready? All software companies do this. It makes it very easy for me to get angry at them.

These things would be a deal breaker for me if I knew up front. Sadly Epicor doesn’t allow a “trial” so you really can’t look under the hood.

I am not bashing the product per se - maybe this is standard for a lot of companies, but coming from Nesuite it’s archaic.

3 year contract. I suppose there’s no getting out of those due to misrepresentation?

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Erik, the more and more I work with Epicor and the new solutions they push as well as the solutions that third parties push, the more and more I blame myself for not asking for tailored demonstrations up front and walking through the solution 100% before pulling the trigger. If they (the software companies) can’t show me a working demo of what we need it to do, I have to say no to it. I can’t leave these items up to chance. So if data carrying over was something that was vital to success, I better be sure that I saw that happening when I was looking at the software of the various vendors. If email clients were important and retained conversations, etc. then I am going to ask for a demo of that.

As for bugs, that’s hard to figure out up front, especially with the newer versions that have yet to be released, but are in the works. You can’t quite know that they are out there from a demo because you can’t demo everything… or maybe you can. Make them show you all the processes from start to finish. Yeah it might make your vendor selection take 3 times as long, but what’s worse, knowing up front it’s not going to work or finding out in the middle of an implementation that it was the wrong decision? I’ve found that I have to push for these demos and proofs of concept. I had this issue with docstar. They charge a huge up front cost to get going with no guarantee that it is going to work or cut time off your ap processing. I actually had them say, “that’s the risk you have to take.” I find this backwards (and the cloud somewhat solves this with SaaS because you can just shut it off if you don’t want to use it anymore- little to no up front cost), but we had to accept that we wouldn’t know whether it was going to make us more efficient. The risk is low that it doesn’t improve ap processing based on what we could demo so we went with it.

In short Erik, I have learned that vendor selection is a lot harder than I anticipated. I learned about it briefly in school and I have to say it is WAY more important than a weekly lesson on it. Building partnerships and choosing vendors is vital to success, but the responsibility is mine to vet the product and see that it checks all of the boxes for vital features.

I’m sorry to hear that you are in this position, I think many of us have been there at one point or another, but I believe you can push through these roadblocks and what Epicor is lacking you can usually customize (although that’s another animal). If these things are vital, find a third party solution and integrate it. There are many people on this forum with recommendations of good consulting firms or people that can build these integrations.

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The biggest disconnect that I find in these situations is non-standard business practices. These systems are built from vanilla business practices and the majority of companies do not follow vanilla business practices. Almost every company has processes that are extremely custom and do not work out of the box in any system. Whether this is due to legitimate business needs or just the way the process worked when the first computer system was implemented at the company. You also have employees on these projects who only know what they know. So when they have a chance to learn a new system or new processes, they refuse to and insist on the new system functioning exactly how they do it today.

Not saying that this is the reason for your troubles, but one of the biggest things I have learned over the years is that more often than not, the system issues are not due to the system, but the people who implemented it. I have worked in multiple ERPs (including SAP) and I honestly would not pick another ERP to purchase other than Epicor. In my experience it is hands down the best.

EVERY ERP has their downfalls and areas that do not work well (Epicor included). The most important thing for any company looking at a new system is to identify their critical processes and look for the system that performs those functions the best.

Everybody always has buyer’s remorse. I think if you stick with it your tone will change.

By the way, I’m not 100% sure as I am not a Project expert, but I thought Epicor went the opposite way, from the Project to the Order. That is, you need to create the project first and create Orders from the Project screen instead. Not sure, but thought I would mention.

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:100:

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No doubt John, I didn’t discern that when you are looking to see the system do exactly what you want, that means you have to be open to changing in order to get it to do what you want- because like you said, no system is going to be built exactly the way you process things.

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I think it’s hard to give any software this massive a fair shake with a 10 day trial (they don’t do that because it’d be impossible to teach yourself everything in that time). It’s not Quickbooks. All we can do is make our due diligence better for the next time. I know I’d have the entire team go through every step they do, to see how it would be done in whatever ERP is getting evaluated. Salesperson would hate me for it, but then at least we’d have our eyes open… The demo would take a solid two weeks at least to cover all the processes and get the questions answered that each dept manager would have. We did the quote to cash with a few ERP’s, but the sales team is good at showing the best side of their software, and not bringing up limitations.

There are definitely frustrations working with Epicor, but many also have work arounds. I’d argue that work arounds shouldn’t be necessary in many cases (working days, hello?), but it takes time to learn the building blocks, and start customizing Epicor to work the way you want to. We’ve all been there, from buying the software on the assurance that ‘Oh, that’s an easy BPM’ to reality of ‘How the heck do I do this?!!’. Especially when you start, and realize that nobody in house is good at it yet, or even has the bandwidth to become the Epicor expert.

Epicor Projects can be linked to the sales order on the SO Entry / Lines - Detail page, but it is frustrating that we need to create BPM’s to push the info over to Project (and use a 1 order : 1 project relationship, so we need to link each line).
Have you done the Epicor Learning Center or Embedded Education courses related to Project?

You can pretty much push anything anywhere with BPM’s/Functions, but you do have to create them yourself, or hire it out. It’s not always trivial.

We’re implementing Hubspot CRM now, to get around Epicor’s limitations for emails, tasks, quoting, etc…

Kinetic bugs are driving me nuts. When 10.2.600 came out, it was a teaser. Then .700, which started getting functionality. Here we are, 2 more releases later on 2021.2, and still finding lots of issues. Unfortunately, we won’t update to the latest dot release without full CRP testing anymore - got burned.

If you want to post and backflush automatically, I’m sure you could do it with BPM’s, Powershell, and some functions, if Epicor doesn’t have it built in (our finance person has some of her tasks scheduled to run periodically in the system agent).

We have a weekly Epicor meeting where a few of us discuss new and past issues, and then prioritize improvements if they are deemed useful. We’re up to #397 this week, and have been live 5.5 years.

I’ve learned a ton lurking here, and usually it’s one tiny thing that gets you stuck, and this forum is fantastic for resolving that! I bet most here would choose the devil we know (Epicor) vs the other ERP’s we don’t…

Hang in there. It will get better.

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That’s always the hard pill to swallow!

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Hang in there @anon99908839 !

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Will you be at insights? I would love to see what you are doing with Hubspot if you can share a little of it.

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When we went to Epicor 10 years, we did everything vanilla and changed our processes to suit the Epicor offering. That is the best decision we made. Upgrades are a breeze, since we hardly have any customizations. Whatever little customizations we had with client code is now all converted to BPM, which also upgrade very well.

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You faced an awful choice; you didn’t necessarily make a mistake. The state of the industry is so bad that Epicor is simultaneously alpha quality garbage that I wouldn’t recommend if it were free, and hands down the best option in its price range.

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Schrodinger’s ERP :thinking:

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I think we can all agree that the tooling and broad flexibility Epicor provides is excellent.

Things like their “CRM” are inexcusable and really need to change.

There are a lot of apologists in this forum for the state of the product and I’d probably include myself in that group at times.

Epicor has a challenge ahead of them with modernization and vision of the product. I think they are definitely heading in the right direction, but they don’t have the luxury of green field development. They have like 40 years of technical baggage and product acquisitions to drag along and support, not to mention the loads of customers that are likely stuck where they are at with whatever ancient version of Epicor they are running. That’s one of the big pushes from Epicor to modernize their product with a cloud SaaS offering, among other reasons ($$).

ERPs are complex and often sucky systems, but they HAVE to fit the business, whether that’s you tailoring your processes to the software or you tailoring the software to your business. Epicor does put you in control of the tailoring process with its excellent tool sets, but it does take a good understanding of exactly what you need to get out of it.

Bang for your buck, Epicor is an attractive offering. Given that you’re in it for 3 years at least, I’d consider spending the time and effort to make good use of what you have.

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Our problem is - our needs are very simple. Customizations aside, I am talking about basic core functions like keeping track of email conversations, drop downs in the email client to email the contacts of the company you’re quoting/billing/etc… pushing an order to a project and carrying over data from the MOM so I am not entering labor/burden/costs all over again into yet another field.

That being said - I have no idea what direction to even take for help. Most software “consultants” want to charge enormous hourly rates for months and embed themselves into your daily operations… we’re much too small for that… I just need a system that works.

I am so tempted to use quickbooks and spreadsheets. That’s how disappointed I am for trying to play with big ERP systems. I learned a very hard and very expensive lesson.

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I don’t think all is lost. You sound like you have a good idea of what exactly you need to get a “win”. The things you mention aren’t impossible. Hell, I don’t even want to know how many free hours of consulting have been given away on this forum for professional help!
Maybe focus in on those couple of items that you absolutely need, like the email tracking, and go from there. I bet you’ll be surprised about how you’ll feel when it gets finished

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Thanks. I’ll try to keep positive and roll with it for now.

This forum is pretty great.

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So Epicor does have a product called Info Worker which let’s you sync contacts and such from Epicor into / out of Outlook and record those emails as “calls” in the Epicor CRM. But I will agree that the Epicor CRM functionality is severely lacking.

I’m not sure I follow your Project / Order issues we might be able to help with some of that, all Orders can be tied to a Project at the Order Line level I’m not sure what you are looking to “push” from the Order to the Project that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

MOM Data is tied to the Part / Part Rev , or Quote and Job so I’m not sure how again that would be pushed into the project. If you quoted and built a Mom on the Quote that will carry through / push to the job attached to the demand order and you can pull details from either a Part Rev, a Job or a Quote so you don’t have to type anything twice.

I think you need some help understanding the software and how it works a bit better. You should do the foundation education classes that Epicor offers and the Education courses for the basics of Quote to Cash. That is all available in the Education Portal.
Take the Epicor Knowledge Camp course.

No software is perfect and Epicor may be too big for you guys you keep saying you are too small. How small is your company? How many users of Epicor?

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This is their “New User” flow take the time to do some of these and you’ll be in much better shape.

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Here is a Walk through of Information worker logging email communication directly into Epicor for you
https://players.brightcove.net/2615230543001/ByL51vWA_default/index.html?videoId=6156058948001

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I know how you feel. I have worked with a few companies who didn’t like Epicor either. They put on this dog-and-pony show with a small dataset.

I don’t have Epicor’s Project but I have seen it in action and it leaves much to be desired. I think folks are expecting something like MS Project. Not even close.

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@anon99908839
After reading @josecgomez’s great post I thought I might add a different perspective. As a small company, you may also want to consider a few other modules:

  • Collaborate - it will track internal conversations at a company and/or transaction level - and you can do some cool things with it and Teams - with more new features to come hopefully.
  • ECM/Docstar or Cloud Account Attachment Storage - you can attach almost anything to a transaction. Have your conversation in Outlook with the customer, and when it’s complete, drop that email thread onto the quote as an attachment. No need to have a permanent connection to outlook in this case - and the storage capabilities can be used all over the system.
  • APR - Print routing and sending documents to the customers. Using the email addresses on the customer/contact/ship-to records you can have the system automatically deliver quotes and order acks and other stuff simply by ‘printing’ them. It’s more flexible than that but it’s nice to use.

I mention these in particular, because we’re ‘building’ a CRM solution out of these pieces so it works the way we want, not just the way some other software works.

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And you are definitely not the first person to be frustrated with learning Epicor!

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