Kinetic Reviews

Epicor is extremely flexible right out of the box, and is exceptionally strong in the areas of managing and tracking Production Jobs, Bill of Materials, Scheduling, Labor, Inventory, Purchasing, and Order Entry. It also has the ability to have customized development, and things like the Epicor BAQ's, Dashboards, and Business Activity Manager features allow customizes information, exportable grids, and notifications to be setup by administrators and even end users as these modules are user-friendly and fairly intuitive! The Shop Floor Data Entry Module (MES) is also very intuitive and simple to use for the users on the production / manufacturing floor.

Epicor ERP is expensive software, and since it's such a wide product that handles so many aspects of your business, setup really must be done according to Epicor's recommendations and completed thoroughly. Also, since it's so flexible, there is a lot of it that you won't use, so it's best to create clear work instructions for your team and/or hide fields and/or functions that you will not need to use.

Easily mass upload and update data. Configurable modules to meet your business needs. Responsive, knowledgeable and helpful consultants.

Some restrictions which are costly to customize and work around. Forms are not easily edited. Many modules are an extra added cost to subscribe every year.

Ease of use, E10 is cloud based, support (when in US) is good, Short learning curve, fairly flexible, highly customizable

Highly customizable tends to get pushed to overly customized which = a mini-new ERP project with every upgrade to fix broken customizations, VAR network: some are great, some not, support for down-rev version falls off quickly, plan on extended cost of ownership, import/export functionality is limited unless add-on products are purchased, Field Service module is the weakest link in the product.

This software handles all of your company needs. It does time management, inventory, project management, and more. This was very easy to roll out to end users.

So far we have only used this for less then 6 mo. I don't have any down side at this point. There is still a learning curve that we need to over come.

it is a very complete software, it can really help you with you planning and manufacturing process, you can control your purchases and your inventory very easy

it lack of controls, you have to customize in order to get more control of your process, the cost of customization it is very high, and the support you get for your maintenance fee is is very poor.

I used this software for 6 years and so I really got to know the ins and outs of it. It's hard to say what I liked most because I didn't really like it that much. One positive is that it's a very robust product probably best suited to a much larger company than ours.

As the out of the box product, there is zero ability to customize anything without paying another company to do it for you. It's possible to make changes if you have training or an additional module, neither of which I had.
There are many security measures in place that makes it difficult to undo something or revise after you've done it.

Ease of use. Build for manufacturing
Integration with other platforms

Epicor is a good ERP. Unfortunately, the ERP industry is more focused on the next customer versus the customers they have and Epicor is part of that. The industry as a whole needs to improve quality and customer service.

We are able to do more with fewer people

We struggle with scheduling complexities and the reporting tools are limited

Being able to track parts through all operations and the short cuts Epicor has

Can be tricky when using transaction History

The MS stack makes it easy to customize for reporting, data storage. Multi-tier configuration with database, application server and options for web-clients, fat clients and terminal servers.
Many options for customization in addition to code development. Multi-everything.

Relatively easy to upgrade and stay on current releases. Great administrative tools and ability to add resources as demand grow, including localizing servers for better performance.

Nothing really. There are lots of modules and each has a lot of simple to understand configuration options.

This software has about anything you could think of to help and personalize it to your business. It has so many different reports and assets to help your business. It even has the ability to link together different chains of stores owned by the same owner. They also use what is called "Bomgar" which is a system that allows them to view and control your screen on any terminal to help resolve any issue.

Nothing is free with this software. If you want the smallest thing they will charge you. You do pay a monthly fee, just like anything else, so you do have access to a call center to walk you through things. However, depending on who you talk to, it is a hit or miss if he/she knows what they are doing and understand what you are looking for. They have different help levels so if they don't understand that can pass you up to a different help level. Sometimes they charge will charge you by hour to take to someone high up.

Another CON, is that nothing is simple or straight forward. With it being such a high-tech system, if you want your system to do more than basic, you have to call the help line to help set it up. Sure, you could do it, but good look trying to figure it out and knowing what other flags in the system you need to mark so nothing else is messed up.

Like the fact that it had the features we needed, was easy to use, and see continued effort by Epicor to improve it by adding new abilities and features to it. We get great support and training is available in many different forms.

Cost was a little higher than what we initially were thinking of in our budget. However, after looking a many ERP systems we quickly found that Epicor had what we wanted and felt that it was worth the investment. It has been 10 years now, and still believe we made the right decision to go with Epicor as our ERP system.

Epicor ERP is an all-in-one solution for medium-sized manufacturers. It covers everything needed and has lots of optional modules.

We use it for:
Quoting
Orders
Jobs/BOMs
Product Configurator
Dashboards
Reports
Purchasing
Inventory
Production
AP & AR invoicing

The Epicor team has worked hard to improve the software over the years, and it is now 100% Microsoft Stack. The SQL database can be queried from within the software using reports and dashboards, or externally using Business Intelligence software such as Power BI or Tableau.

The price point is better compared to some of its larger competitors in the ERP space. If you have less than 200 users, Epicor will be a much more cost-effective ERP than the ERP leaders.

The opportunities for customisation and personalisation are very high.

Earlier versions of Epicor ERP were slow and clunky, but the new version is really fast. Also, you need experts to help you implement the software, and a dedicated team to maintain it.

This is not an "out of the box" solution. It requires you to map your business processes and then implement the software carefully to suit the way your business works. You can customise almost anything you want in the system, but greater customisation brings with it added complexity and possible issues when upgrading point releases and versions.

I mostly like the ease of use of this software. Data entry and Data queries are easy to do with the many screens provided in this software. One thing to mention is the powerful search function to find different screens, displays their path within this software so that is also a big plus. Another positive is the overall navigation of this software with the different modules feels natural because of the 'tree view' option for the menu items. The different maintenance screens are set up pretty nicely and can be customized depending on what type of SaaS option you have so that is great as well. I also really like the security settings I can adjust to prevent users from accessing certain screens or hiding certain fields from them. One final mention for this section would have to be the SSRS integration. I design lots of reports and it is extremely easy to pull data into an SSRS report and present them how I want it.

Of all the pros that I have listed in the previous section, there are some cons to mention as well. One mention that I like least about this software is the optimization of this software. Many screens take at least 2 minute to open and that is with the recommended hardware specs provided. Another mention is that the PDF reports take at least 2 minute or more to view. I know that the reports are server side and I don't know the process flow of it but it would be nice to click the print preview button and 3 seconds later, have the report show.

This software allows a quoter to include every facet of a project before it gets a customer PO. From that quote, every detail is able to be brought through to the order, the job, the packing slip, and the final invoice. There are so many different ways to track various phases of the project as it moves through. Every detail can be recorded if every employee is disciplined enough to make the input. Then, 10 years from now, when the machine finally has a hiccup, (and assuming everyone entered all the details) you know every purchased part and have a link to every drawing used in manufacturing. Your customer will be amazed when you can recite those part numbers and pull prints within minutes 10 years later with absolute accuracy. You will eliminate QuickBooks, sales force or any other CRM, MS Project, and a host of programs that are not integrated and require multiple entries once you are fully functional. This software will transform your company, and you will become more profitable than you were before. Your work week will never be under 50 hours again, and you will either learn very facet of the software of spend well over 100k every year to keep it running, but if you stay on every employee all the time to do their best and do YOUR best, you will realize some incredible benefits. Our company does more with 20 people than many companies do with 50, and we manufacture parts and machinery. We can credit a lot of that success to the Epicor ERP system.

There are a few Caveats. There is no way you can employ a single person who is not college educated. Without math skills, great writing and data entry skills, and an exceptional amount of discipline, you will not get the quality inputs, and the software will not be able to give quality outputs. Slowly, over a period of about 3-5 years, you will come to the realization that people just cant come up to the level of inputting the information correctly, and you will have to decide if you want this software to work and be useful of if you want to eliminate these people. There is no other way, it simply cant work. Garbage in - Garbage out.
The complexity of the entire computer industry has taken the decision that they are going to complicate every facet that they can to require you to hire consultants to do what for 20 years you could easily do yourself. Continual updates, incredibly complicated reporting that an average person used to be able to do, and a constant push to the cloud really get in the way of helping your customers at every turn. It is almost as if, as a machine shop in our case, your mission is to configure software all day and never deliver a single project.
The pros outweigh the cons, but the cost of ownership and value of the effort put into keeping the software functional was less than 10% in 1996-2010 than it is today. If our company was looking at this software today, I really don't know if it would be possible to justify it.

This software has a ton of features. From Quote to Invoicing and every piece of the production pipeline in between.

It's not super intuitive and requires a bit of a learning curve to get it going in the right direction.

ITs flexibility and ability to customize. Cloud versions available. Offers many modules for most needs. There has been in the past several years a building of third party software vendors with the ability to augment the customization, implementation and general maintenance of the software requiring less reliance on Epicor consulting services. Features such as document routing has greatly improved forms handling. The software is definitely in growth mode resulting in new features and abilities. The number one feature I like is the ability to export any report and most data grids directly to excel. Overall I have more likes on were the software is going rather than were it is at today

The software is not at all user friendly. Little if any documentation on how to use the product. Education is available but pricey. Support system is totally ineffectual and support personal are lacking in basic knowledge. Company has built many silos and employees do not have the ability to see across those barriers. The online support system called Epicare has added a layer of difficulty in that you cannot speak with an employee to explain an issue. The online submission is often limited to drop down selections that have nothing to do with the problem. The helpful tips you are given when submitting a case are almost always way off topic and of no use.

- very powerful and thorough functionalities for all manufacturing operations
- extremely good costing capabilities (all financial features are quite good, actually)
- can be customized to a great extent
- many tools for reporting and data analysis
- integrates with tools such as MES, bar code reader, is ready for EDI

- it's a bit more slow that I wish it were
- customer support is very bureaucratic, it takes from a couple of days to weeks to get any issue solved (to be fair, they do solve them)
- learning curve is steep. It's not that easy to use so people who are not tech-savy get a bit intimidated by this tool
- instruction manuals and help menu are only available in English

Epicor's service-oriented architecture is powerful - allows us to adapt their platform to our business use case and workflows when necessary. Recent versions hit at a somewhat modern UI which we're looking forward to, and the addition of the RESTful API has been a godsend.

Lots of bugs introduced in each version - but the pace of releases is fast to keep up with them. Their support is rough when necessary. Can take literal days or weeks trying to get through to someone in the right country/right team who actually understands the failure mode and is willing to take the issue seriously.

Very flexible and powerful user interface. Software modules have extensive flexible options to tailor the configuration to work as desired. Most modules very integrated, allowing powerful user capability. User personalization is powerful and easy to administer.

Customization is often too complex. Need C# programmer and still can be complicated. In V9 to V10 customization languages changed which required rewrite of previous customizations. This is very costly rather than tools being available to effectively migrate existing customizations. Upgrades of software modules is too complex and is being worked on to improve and focus more on ease, allowing companies to keep on the current release without seeming like a new implementation. More work than it should be. Several modules are included for improving requirements and are very weak. Example: Integration to Salesforce.

This ERP makes it extremely easy to quote items that do not have part numbers set up in the system. We fabricate custom designed process equipment which requires many purchased components. And often times our customers require us to follow their specific Approved Material List which could include components we have not purchased before.
Epicor allows to quote parts, kits, systems without forcing us to create part numbers which makes quoting very easy and quick. No sense in setting up part numbers if we don't have the job yet.

The CRM part is not the greatest. Needs to be improved or allow Sales Force or other leading CRM software to tie in to Epicor.

I like the flexibility to customize the software to fit your business. There are many features which can be incredibly useful. The fact that it is Windows-based is a plus fo our antiquated facility.

The one con I have about this software is the price. I like that we can find status updates in real-time on orders or inventory; however, to get this feature you have to pay even more money.

Built-in customization tools are very powerful - allowing detailed tailoring to company needs without direct coding. BPMs now allow excellent logic branching and very nice built in features such as email alerts. Publish & Subscribe dashboards are a great reporting option with drill down capability. Form customizations are also very easy. SQL Server DB is a big improvement over Progress and MUCH faster.

Reliance on SSRS for reporting - although Crystal Reports still works. Does not handle really complex BoM/MoM situations well for jobs with thousands of assembly levels and hundreds of branches or indents. Projects module isn't quite robust enough to be used for complex jobs/orders.

We have used Epicor for about 3 months and so far it has went very well. Change over from our previous system went smoothly. Movement in the system is very simple, it is easy to find what you are looking for through the menu system.

You are a click away from about any information you would need for planning and scheduling.

In the beginning we had some issues with inventory suggestions, the system wanted everything at the moment it realized we were below minimums, but after a few weeks or research we were able to set the system to work as we needed it to.

A few other small issues at start up, but over all not difficult implementation

It has truly helped the company grow and able to analyze what works and what isn't. Purchasing and Project Management is simple and straightforward.

It isn't aesthetically pleasing and I have noticed many users like it to be sleek..