Good morning! I’m a new member – not a current Epicor user, but we have used Vantage in the past. We migrated to ECi M1 10 years ago now and we’re looking at migrating back to Epicor Kinetic.
I have a demo scheduled with Epicor for Kinetic ERP… really liking what I am seeing so far and think it would be a great fit for us. And on top of that, a lively community is really encouraging.
For those that have migrated from M1, or other ERPs, what expectations should I have if we pull the trigger? We would be an on prem customer.
We migrated an acquired company from ECI M1 to Epicor Kinetic last year. Data mapping wise, that was straightforward. Created a few SQL views and extracted as needed.
As far as the application change, the users seemed to pick up epicor web UI quickly. I think classic mode would look too different.
Epicor is very easy to customize and build dashboards and reports.
A few quick things that stand out were order releases vs shipment schedules. Subcontract is more sophisticated in Epicor, which feels more complicated at first.
Something I found odd about M1 is that records do not/were not closing themselves. For example, in epicor a sales order line is closed when it is shipped complete, the order closes when the entire order is shipped. M1 needed us to close the orders manually? felt odd to me.
feel free to throw a few questions at me here, happy to share what we learned.
We similarly migrated an acquisition from M1 to Epicor ERP a few years ago. Like Bryan said, the data migration itself was straightforward and there was usually a 1-to-1 relationship from M1 to Epicor data tables.
Epicor gives you a lot of flexibility to customize almost anything from screens to processes to reports. That also means it’s easy to get yourself stuck trying to force Epicor to conform to your business processes when it’s not designed to do that.
I would suggest you try to use Epicor’s stock processes and screens as much as possible, and only customize if there is a critical business process that Epicor can’t support out-of-the-box. Really challenge your managers and process owners to explain why the “Epicor way” won’t work and get buy-in from leadership to make that a high bar to pass before you customize Epicor.
For as much as some of us like to complain about decisions made in Kinetic, generally it’s built to follow and promote best practices in manufacturing. That doesn’t mean it will 100% work for your company without some tweaking, but if you’re trying to make major modifications to the processes in Kinetic, you probably need to take a step back and review why you’re trying to do something differently.