We have acquired another company, which does the same products types as us (kind of a mirror of our company) But are not using Epicor.
We are in the verge of deciding if we go multicompany or add sites (they have 5 different companies )
My question is: There is a high probability that production may be done by either us or them.
If we go multicompanies, can we share Customers, and parts? Instead of creating them again in the new company in Epicor? What flag I need to set so the Customer and /or part can be seen in the other company environment?
(and for parts, I assume a new revision and new MOM would need to be created )
and MRP would be able to assign production to the company that would have available resources ?
as @Jose said, yes, you can have shared parts… but it still takes some setup in both companies.
you have to setup the global table setup… this allows you to define which fields are shared between the two companies
THEN in the “owning” company, you mark the part as a GLOBAL part (a checkbox).
THEN in the subscribing company, you go and import the data, What this will do is, it will create the same part in the new company, but you will not be able to edit any of the global fields. If the field is not marked as global, then you can still edit it (ie… one company might have different Product groups than the other, so that should not be global).
Now, when you change the description of the part in the owning company, the description also changes in the subscribing company.
No it will not work that way. A sales order for example, can only be entered in one company. You can’t later decide you want to move the order to a different company that has capacity (and Epicor has no way to suggest that either). You would have to cancel the order out of the first company and recreate it in the other company. Or else create an intercompany drop ship order from one company to another.
The other major consideration more than anything else is the legal setup. If they are actually separate companies that have to report their own trial balance, with their own tax ids, you don’t really have a choice - they have to be set up as separate companies unless you want to undertake a customization effort to be able to give each site their own financials.
I would also say Epicor’s treatment of organizations with multiple companies is among its most painful (and ignored) shortcomings. Switching companies within the application (which you must do BEFORE launching whichever screen you are trying to do), is tedious and painful. Even in Kinetic its 2 clicks, wait, wait some more for the context to finish switching, finally open the screen. All day every day for people who truly operate across companies. So so so painful. Yes there are some tricks to save shortcuts separately for different companies and whatnot but it really does not negate the pain. If you want any cross-company reporting or dashboards, you will be building it all from scratch. Multi-site also comes with its own challenges and complexity, but I don’t think it comes close to the pain of trying to use different companies in one Epicor deployment.
I was always told to use taxing entities as the rule of thumb to go multi-site versus multi-company. If the merged companies will have 1 taxing ID then keep Epicor at 1 company with multiple sites. If the current company will have a different tax ID than the acquisition it would be separate companies in Epicor.
That being said, we did do testing to see which was easier. Definitely easier setting up multiple sites, although getting full financials at the site level is difficult (e.g. aged receivables kept at a corporate level). We did not test multi-companies with a consolidation level above it though.
Hopefully you have a test environment - there are KB articles in EpicWeb for setting up multi company so you could give it a try safely in a test environment.
I was told the same. In addition, any companies that go across borders/oceans will need to be separate. In any event all of the above that @aosemwengie1 said is true. The intercompany process is such a time drain when something gets stuck in the system. Sometimes it’s impossible to fix without Support’s help.
@Mark & @Doug.C Hah! I’ve got to keep entering EpiCare cases to request a new multi-company Data Fix every 6 weeks (because dev apparently won’t give support a longer expiration date anymore).
It’s hard to explain that away to the executive team. Why one of the the biggest selling points for that company was the ability to do intercompany transactions. Only then to have everything get stuck and have to keep submitting support tickets.
“seamless integration” 
