Epicor ERP 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.

Very Customizable. Uses industry standard .Net programming language and function. Hooks to SQL server.

Not geared for small operations. The cost of entry makes this product geared to Mid sized companies.

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.

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.

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.

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..

Epicor ERP has incredible functionality for supply chain management, which is acquired by an entire organization, in order to maintain proper control, to classify appropriate use, that is, to know precisely where these will be used digital products, in the different departments that we acquire in executive disposition, mentioning that it allows us to modify their visual aspects, to establish them in our most conducive environment, being one of the tools that most attracts my attention, as it is one of the ones that I use for adequate familiarization, when executing the pending work to be done.

It is important to note that many of the functions that most companies use must be added by users, which allows the process at work to be slower and delays the qualities in productivity, being a significant problem, since these working parts must be integrated. by the same software, for a majority management in the performance and profitability of the time, which requires an update in these sectors of the system.

I frequently use this program to track historical product records. I can pull a full production detail report, to see each and every operation a part has gone through.

Sometimes, the reporting feature takes awhile to pull the report. This is only the case for very large reports however!

The software is very robust. Just about everything that the software does is configurable and modifiable. The interface is fairly customizable, you can move things around and even change the color scheme to your liking.

I wouldn't say I dislike this, but do take into consideration that the customization of the software requires a significant amount of programming skill. This software is not targeted at smaller companies that wouldn't have an IT staff or are not willing to spend money on outside programmers.

The ERP allows us to create dashboards to track company performance, includes good documentation and built in help (application level or field level), and we have access to a great user group to help us explore new modules before we buy and implement them.

There are inconsistencies between modules or menus that are not intuitive. Support is expensive and oftentimes unresponsive.

It's very easy to learn and it's very flexible. Once you are familiar with the interface it's easy to navigate and find the way to get the job done. Exporting information to another tools is easy and useful.

Impossible to drag and drop... I'm lazy! Seriously, there are some features that I would like to have like create templates for common daily tasks.

-- Customizable
-- Excel based grid views for easier export of data and dynamic dashboards
-- Scalability
-- Integration capabilities

-- Not intuitive
-- Inadequate Help information
-- Expensive
-- Tier 1 Support extremely lacking
-- User Manuals are generic

Very powerful tool, some quirks to the way Epicor has their default process setup. Dashboards and BAQ's are easy to make, a lot of training guides to take you through it.
BPM is a great tool to use to automate user entry.

A lot of functionality/custom is locked from MT customers, due to their DB setup. Going on-prem or dedicated hosted is a better option, if you are looking for a lot of custom changes.

Features
Scalability
Flexibility
Adaptation to Various Industries
Industry History & Reputation

Ease of Deployment
Modifications to Older Versions
Price entry point for smaller businesses
Deployment Costs

It does include many documentation and training for a comprehensive functionality. It offers a couple of interfaces to choose which makes it more nice on the look. I also like the fact that it includes a smartphone app for tasks on the go.

Although it includes training documents, the process flowcharts might be a bit complex to use, some tasks require steps not very easy to do and the documentation does not include detailed information but only overall. The price is also a bit high, I would love to be able to choose whether different options I really need, discard some others and reduce the final price.

The user interface was fairly good. While it's a modularized system it seemed to integrate its information across the system.

Their customer service wasn't the best. We could have used more support especially during implementation.

if user use and enter info into system correctly, could be good data center for sales, financial forecasting and inventory control analytics.

not user friendly , not easy to integration with other application , especially if you are under multi-tenant SAAS, Took long time for the support and need extra resource to get the integration done for over 2 years .

We use Epicor for all the activities at work, from order entry, shipping all the way to invoicing.
This system allowed us to keep track of inventory and was even tailored to our company needs, which helped pull real data to keep track of KPI’s. My department was in charge of the orders.

Sometimes pulling reports could take longer than wanted/needed.

Has scope for customisation and works well when used as an ERP

When used as a CRM, the software is very slow
Requires technical knowledge and a lot of development time to make changes (create views, reports, etc)

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.

One of my favorite things about this program is the different levels of customization that it provides. Epicor allows for a range settings and customization's ranging from field security to changing how business objects interact this allows our company to really personalize and create our own version of Epicor (to a certain extent that is). I also really like how fast and efficient the technical support for Epicor is. Calling in to create a ticket for any issues that occur is always an easy process.

Some custimaztions are harder to make then they should be and sometimes finding clear information about how to make certian changes can be hard to find. I think the two main things I currently do not like are the scheduling module it can seem clunky. Also the limited coding that is allowed due to being a multi tenant client however this is more about what we purchased then the product it self.

Easy to use, Get training available, Always working to improve their product, Great support. Epicor continues to improve there software adding new features that customers are looking for, adding third party solutions to plug into their software. They are adding features before we are even ready to use them, being able to go more mobile, improving communication between users at our company. Great Product configurator, best I have seen!

Does cost a little more than we were hoping, but the ROI made it worthwhile doing. Moving away from crystal to SSRS was a little rough, but like the change once we were through it.

Very versatile software that can be adapted to fit any business needs. I have been a Senior Consultant for Epicor and also an end user for a total of 15 years in all functional areas.

Feel free to contact me with any questions.

Robert W F Krause
Epicor/ERP/Consulting
Krause Consultants
Cell: 516.983.8095
Email: [email protected]
http://www.krauseconsultants.com/

The software is very complex and requires some initial training to use it effectively.

This ERP is very customisable. You can change the behavior of the software with it's DATA DIRECTIVE, METHODE DIRECTIVE. You can change the look and feel of every screen with it's internal .NET engine.

It is slow... You will need a very fast server.
The query engine (BAQ) is very limited with Epicor 9 but I heard it's better with Epicor 10.
If you made a lot of customisation, the upgrades will be difficult.