Epicor, I think is a great program, with lots of customization, but I concur, you need a team of people that want to adopt and understand it and have the patience to learn new skills. This team also needs to express their adoption in positive terms to all other employees, especially the thick headed ones.
I am going to be pretty critical of Epicor here because although I now love it, They do a lot of things that I think are just BS and I would want anyone to be prepared for what actually happens during sales - implementation.
We implemented about a year ago, and we actually worked directly with Ernie, he was great. Unfortunately for Ernie, he has to try to make Epicor do what the salesman promised, and deal with a guy like me who is ready to get it done, with what the sales guy said it would do. He became a bit of a scapegoat for Epicor because the first few addon modules did not work at all as described and that was incredibly frustrating. We evaluated 12 different ERP software, and I do think we picked the right one in the long run, BUT the sales people at Epicor are great at selling you on stuff that you don’t need, but oddly not great at selling the stuff you do need; and then the implementers have to do their best to live up to that salesman promise. Some of the things we wanted, (like payroll) Epicor claimed they did, and did well, and when we went to implementation, it did NOT do it well because we couldn’t track accruals, or time off calculations. We really thought we would be able to get rid of our timeclock and payroll services, to combine all in one nice neat package, but it did not do the basics of what those softwares do. Maybe a much more expensive module would, but I don’t trust it. My experience with this: Once you license a module, it is incredibly hard to “return” it, and I probably ruined someone’s day with all the yelling I had to do just to get it done. To me, they sold me something that does not do what it promised. So my suggestion is to purchase the basics, ask for demos of the modules specifically, and do not purchase them until you know they will work. And get a demo from someone who actually uses that module.
Ernie and the rest of our implementers had a “path to success” timeline, which is good as a guideline, but sometimes I think it hindered moving the process forward faster. I can see why it exists, but for us, I was basically working on the implementation full time which I am guessing is not the norm, and I also am not afraid to hit buttons and read tech manuals so I was ready to keep building it. Ernie can attest, we had some “choice” times where I wanted to move to the next thing, and there were many things I wanted done now that Ernie thought should be part of the next phase, But I was also humbled at the complexity and time it did take to get the thing up and running, and Ernie was not wrong about holding back a bit.
For something they did not sell me, but they should have, especially since I asked and asked for it, is the warehouse interface. We asked for barcode ability, and scanning of inventory movements, and although Epicor does this “out of the box”, it does not do it well in it’s natural state. It was worth every penny to add on the Epicor mobile warehouse, and a bolt on software called bartender. It is SO much easier to create product labels that auto print with this setup, then it is to use the SSRS reports, especially because we are cloud based. If you want to track inventory movements via a scan tool, print product labels for your parts, and not deal with ssrs reports for that function Look into this add on.
Kinetic is… well… almost good. Many of the screens are much faster and there are somethings that do work better in it. It is also what the web login uses so knowing them is a must, BUT there are some screens that are just easier in classic views, like Purchase suggestions. My main issue with kinetic, it seems like every time they do an update, we get a massive bug or we loose customization.
Currently, we have a bug where our shop floor personnel will log into a job via the data collection station, and if it is not the first job they clock into for the day, it will error and they cannot clock into it. All the data that is in the screen is actually for the previous job they were working on (even though they clocked out of it), and to fix it, they have to do a full clock out, clock in, start production. It is SUPER annoying and so far tech support does not seem to understand how much of a problem it is (and that it is a new problem that never happened before). It took 2 days and an escalation in the case to get them to at least try to figure out what was going on, and now it seems like it is “going thought the channels” for the next release. I can tell you, if this continues for the next 4 months, I will have to yell again to express my frustration with it. I can’t be the only one with this problem. It is really difficult to get employees on board with Kinetic, and then every 6 months have to revert back to classic because the kinetic is broken. However, I would still recommend your train in Kinetic screens so you don’t know what you are missing with the classic screens.
Tech support is pretty good. I like having a help desk, and i have used it a number of times. It can just be slow, and sometimes I feel that the tech support teams don’t have a clue how damaging some of these bugs can be to a business, and how they need to step it up and resolve them faster. I have had some cases get resolved incredibly fast, with a phone call an hour after I put in the case, Remote session, and fix, But other times, its like pulling teeth to get them to understand the problem, and how horrible it is.
Understand planning time fences, days of supply, and parameters that will affect your po suggestions. We still struggle with this a lot and it can be kind of hard to explain. For some reason, Epicor thinks it is a good idea to give you 2 different screens for Purchasing. One called “Change suggestions” and one called “purchase suggestions”. Then it seems to double up what you are supposed to do with a part that didn’t make its required by date, by having it in the purchasing suggestion again and also in the change suggestion as “expedite”. For example, If you order a product today, and the po says it is supposed to be here tomorrow, but it doesn’t make it, it will create another po suggestion for another one, and a change suggestion to expedite it. If you follow both, you basically will have ordered it twice. It has caused us to order the same thing twice numerous times. I honestly wish I could just turn off the change suggestion feature right now so if a part is on order, and there is no other demand, it will stay off the suggestion board, but I can’t. So we set up time fences to try to eliminate this, but it still generates change suggestions to “add more” to an existing PO if more demand happens. we hate that, so to resolve it we go lock the quantity on the po, but that has other negative things as well. it has been probably the most frustrating thing to get right out of all daily operations. It is especially tough now because all of our lead times have nearly trippled from normal with all the supply shortages, and that is causing all sorts of “expedite” suggestions even though we cannot “expedite” from a manufacturer.
Finally, if I were you, I would force your implementers to teach you the BAQ feature, and DMT. They actually use it a lot themselves, but it is not something we ever went over. Oddly, I learned how to use the BAQ with the Epicor mobile warehouse folks, and the credit card processing folks, and DMT by trial and error. Now I use them every day. Learning these tools also really helps advance knowledge of how to configure your SSRS reports, create data directives, and configure report data definitions.
I am sure any other ERP software would have had the same challenges, and I would just be prepared for them. Epicor has pretty solid support, good implementing partners, and the software will do everything you need in a manufacturing environment, just be realistic about the challenges of implementation and that you will need to license more modules to get it all to work the way you need, and be prepared for it to take WAY longer then you might expect.
