Salesforce / Kinetic Integration

Kinetic ERP
1

We are evaluating a move to Salesforce and are looking for feedback from anyone who has integrated Salesforce with Epicor Kinetic and CPQ.

We are currently looking at MuleSoft and Duet360. Has anyone used either of these for a Salesforce/Kinetic/CPQ integration?

A few specific questions:

  • How long did your implementation take?
  • Did you use MuleSoft, Duet360, or another integration platform?
  • How much internal IT involvement was required after go-live?
  • Did quote-to-order flow cleanly from Salesforce CPQ into Kinetic?
  • Did the integration support complex configured products, kits, options, or bundles?
  • If you used Duet360 and Endowance, how was your experience with the product, implementation, support, and ongoing management?
  • Would you choose the same integration architecture again?

Any lessons learned, timelines, or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

2

I built our integration in-house with BPM’s, Kinetic functions, and the Salesforce APIs. Our Salesforce partner did the Salesforce customization capture the correct data and to push data to Kinetic via the integration we built. I built the integration right before we added Automation Studio. If I had to do it over again, I’d use Automation Studio.

We planned 2 phases of implementation. Phase 1 deals with Customers, Contacts, Parts, Misc Charges and Quotes. To support quote creation in Salesforce, we implemented a function that Salesforce calls to use Price List Inquiry to get the appropriate price for the customer. We don’t maintain pricing in Salesforce.

Phase 2 will deal with pushing Orders and shipments to Salesforce. We haven’t pursued Phase 2 yet because adoption of Salesforce has been glacier-like.

My observation is that if you don’t customize Salesforce a fair amount, you will find the data difficult to integrate to Kinetic. If you do customize Salesforce to get data that integrates well, then you may get resistance from the Salesforce end users.

As an example, quoting in Salesforce looks and sounds easy, until you need Salesforce to include freight and sales tax and you want that quote to flow into Kinetic. To make that happen, the rep has to provide the Ship To address so it can be determined whether or not freight is taxable in the delivery state. The freight taxable result determines which of the freight misc. charge codes is used when pushing the quote to Kinetic. The Ship To address is also necessary so we can determine whether the quote needs to include tax at all.

We had a great deal of discussion before pursing integration. My position was that if you want to integrate, you should do it at the start so you aren’t trying to merge common data from 2 different sources later. Before you head down an integration path, make sure you know what the goals are for the integration and get buy-in from all the stakeholders.

3

Maybe there is a second part to the SF Epicor SF integration/connector thing that covers the SF side… I guess just another thing to look at… I am sure that the adhoc synching may be more effectively done with workato, and the bulk done with the standard.