Aptean Intuitive ERP is an enterprise resource planning solution. It is built specifically for manufacturers who build products in regulated industries, such as aviation, electronics, and medical devices. It includes features such as product configuration, component serial number traceability, and engineering change management.
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Epicor Kinetic
Score 7.4 out of 10
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Epicor Kinetic (the name of the former Epicor ERP) presents a wide feature breadth, customizability, and scalability, typical product-centric cloud ERP offerings. It is meant as a single, end-to-end software solution for businesses, and is available on-premise, hosted, or in the cloud as a software as a service (SaaS) solution.
If you have a programmer and are willing to let them learn the system and want software to function the way you run your business this may work well. If you do not have a programmer on staff and are willing to change your business to match the software but think in the future you may wish to modify your ERP software this may work out well. If you want something you can modify quickly this is not a good choice. If you do not wish to modify the code nor your business practices an evaluation would be required. It does allow substantial modifications, but there are areas it may not fit with your business so well. It is possible that Intuitive may happen to make the options you require available in the future.
Epicor is an excellent system for most manufacturing customers and offers several features previously only offered on the very large (e.g. Oracle, PeopleSoft, etc) level platforms. Yet the pricing is mid-level, and the expandability through additional modules provides a great opportunity for future business growth. The architecture is easily scalable, fast, and offers great options for both on premise and hosted systems. Epicor is flexible, and large enough that regular updates and enhancements continue to be adopted to improve functionality and effectiveness. It is however, not for everyone. Competition in this sector is very good, with several mid-level systems being available at a similar price point. If you are considering adopting a new ERP system and are in the plastics space, you also owe it to yourself and your team to consider IQMS, which is becoming a de-facto standard in this segment. Also, for specific medical sectors, you will find that Epicor software validation for CFR Part 11 compliance can be quite costly-- although the software is capable of supporting this with modification. Overall, Epicor is a solid choice. Ultimately, it will be up to your team to determine what works best for your needs. You won't be disappointed with Epicor if you do the due diligence and take the time needed to properly review and demo the product. Remember though, demos are typically "best case" staged, so be sure to throw several curveballs at your vendor and bring out the unique requirements of your business.
Epicor has the best product configurator that I have seen on the market. This was one of the main reasons we went with Epicor, and have not been disappointed at all.
Epicor is also one of the easiest ERP system to learn, and has many ways for users to get training. Epicor University, on-line courses, or class room settings, also user conference every year, and user support groups.
The Enterprise search ability in Epicor is great, can find parts, customers, suppliers, etc. so easily. And if you can't remember where a report or task that you want to do is on the menu, you can search for that also.
Documentation. The design of en extensible system works well once you figure it out. Some things can be tricky and time consuming.
They provide no support for customizations. I can understand not wanting to help write specific custom code, but they refuse to even tell anyone what a method on a base class does unless you pay them $200 an hour.
Their proprietary design can cause modifications to take longer. If you use one of their forms you can not load it, you must call their launch function and put you code in the "Execute" method. If they were more standardized the documentation issue would not be so bad.
If the answer to your problem is not readily available in an answer book, your response or solution will take months, if you get one at all. Problems need to be sent to support and duplicated by them before they try to fix it. This is extremely frustrating because you have to prove to Epicor that you are having an issue. If by some miracle you get by this barrier, your problem is submitted to development for review. You can't speak to them or communicate in any way directly. This group appears to be completely unconcerned about user issues or customer service. Our experiences have been negative across the board.
We select Aptean 19 years ago, most of the other SMB packages back then no longer exist. While we have discussed whether to consider other ERP systems here an there over the years we have always come back to the fact that our existing ERP system is well established and easy enough to maintain, and is cost effective
Everyone at our organization really appreciated "made 2 manage" because of all of the quick access and some of the capabilities in accounting. So far, Epicor is much more advanced but the two can stand side by side. These two programs cannot really be compared just because it's just not fair to compare an on-site server ERP system to a cloud-based one.
The software is pretty easy to use. Things are pretty clear on how to do them and if you don't know how to do something they have instructions on how to do them or you get an error code telling you exactly what to do. I have been satisfied with my overall experience.
The ROI can be hard to quantify. We spend more time setting up and entering information up front, but we spend less time than before trying to track project costs so that evens out. Purchasing the system and implementing it was very expensive, but the benefit is the the better information can save money on projects as we know where best to spend our time and identify potential problems earlier on a project. We believe it will have a positive impact, but I'd say it will take a few years (3-4) to be worth it.
