BQE CORE is a business management solution built specifically for professional service firms. BQE CORE is a combination of a billing assistant, project management, and accounting solution. CORE is designed to do the hard work of delivering actionable insights directly to the user's dashboards or inbox. BQE CORE replaces the products Engineeroffice, Archioffice, and BillQuick; the functionality of these applications is now found in BQE CORE.
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Epicor HCM
Score 6.4 out of 10
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Epicor HCM is a human resource management system (HRMS) and is available as on-demand software as a service (SaaS), hosted, or on-premise license. Self-service access to the HRMS is available to employees and managers.
CORE is well suited for time entry and reporting across employee groups and projects. CORE can generate many useful reports, however the customization and filtering of these reports isn't exactly intuitive. It can be difficult to get the reports to show the data you want, and there is no way to remove data fields from a report or create a custom report.
While Epicor HCM is functional for enterprises with many branch locations, I feel that is best suited out of the box for locations with corporately centralized HR. This overcomes some of the shortcomings of security capability and the need to spend a lot of time in configuring routing. The CSS portion of Epicor HCM is not as robust as competing systems and should not be used if corporations are actively looking to onboard at a high rate.
Invoice Collections within Billing is a great tool because of the ability to take notes and track contact.
Invoices are professional looking and easy for our clients to understand the overall progress within each phase of their project.
Dashboards are the best tool EVER!
The Contact List feature within Clients setup is the perfect way to track multiple project managers within a large company that also has multiple contracts with us.
Security is always an issue with payroll/HR software. Security in Epicor HCM is very robust. In our manufacturing facility it is important that supervisors have access to their employee's information and the software allows me to limit access to only the correct department. There is also menu security that will allow me to remove access to features by user and grant access only to what they require to do the job.
This software is the repository for many different types of employee information. For example in the past we have tracked skills training by employee in either an Access database or an Excel spreadsheet. We are currently in the process of loading individual employee skill information which will allow us to query the database to pull any information that is not already a canned report in the system.
Payroll tax reports are handled by the system seamlessly. In our old system I had to keep confidential employees in a different "company" which meant I had to combine the two companies and do quarterly and year end tax reporting manually. The confidential flag in Epicor HCM allows me to utilize reports directly from the system and also creates the files needed to file online for both my quarterly SUI and W-2 reporting to SSA at year end.
Startup training is available (& you need it so that you get off to a great start)
A report that shows the key setups for a project that can be glanced over quickly to assure it is correct
A way to set a new start date for the dashboards and data set, or a way to default old bad data to a default so reports run without bad data showing up.
Administrative set-up is a nightmare --> Set-up such as e-mail templates (routing, candidate communication, alerts) and configuring security rights for users, includes looking at list of approximately 100 fields some of which seem like duplicates. Interestingly, you may find that the field you need is missing. You'll need to create a work-around or pay Professional Services to get it set-up correctly, even though they should logically be available. Another alternative is that you need to go to an obscure task under Utilities that you've never used before so you can uncheck a box.
Auto alerts seem like a great idea, but the set-up is limited in such a way that you will probably need a Filter SQL statement to get it the way you want. (Ex: No way on the birthday alert to simply filter to active employees. Get ready to send out over 500 alerts for ALL employees and dependents.) You can either ask someone in your IT department or again, go to Professional Services ($$$).
Routing also seems like a great idea but if you make too many changes in the routing set-up, it errors out and doesn't allow you to submit changes. Instead you must make only a few changes, submit, then go to the task again. Efficiency is not a concern for HCM. If you have more than 5-10 routes in the system for certain tasks, this can slow down the entire routing page, making you wait between 20-40 seconds to approve and go to the next route. This will make for a fun time during your annual review process when you've got 100+ reviews routed to you.
Epicor staff (except for customer support) are salespeople--first and foremost --> Glassdoor reviews show that Epicor "emphasizes billable hours above all else" -- we've experienced this firsthand. Most account managers, implementation and interface consultants will try get you on the phone (at a whopping $100-$300/hr) to talk about nothing and avoid delivering what you've paid them for. If they're not doing that, they may just ignore your e-mails and never get back to you.
Unreliable customer support --> Customer support staff seems understaffed and sometimes lack technical knowledge. Not surprising considering that HCM is so convoluted and frustrating. Even the most expert support reps are stumped by questions--the system is just that confusing. Sometimes there is no resolution at all so your call is turned into a service change request. Then you cross your fingers and hope it gets addressed in the next upgrade. I submitted one support call over two months ago. It is still open. Sadly that is not out of the norm.
Unexplainable errors in interfaces --> Payroll and benefits interfaces have been unreliable. Employee data changes are dropped with no explanation; ergo, there is no possible solution. Unless of course you want your benefits consultant to spend several hours ($$$) researching it or very, very slowly talking you through it over the phone.
Customizations that keep on breaking and breaking and breaking --> HCM releases updates almost twice a year, with "new and improved" features. Sometimes the features don't work, as if the software was updated without any testing or foresight. You'll find that customizations you've paid for have broken inexplicably and need to be re-done. Of course you will be charged for the extra hours needed to fix the customizations.
We have been using Core for a few years now, and honestly started to look at other software systems to see what was out there. What we chose was a nightmare for migration so we never left Core. Now we have added invoicing and payments from Core instead of double entry with QBO. Still only a few cycles in but looks like it will be up to speed soon and working smoothly.
I just recently lost my job after 16 years, and purposely sought out a position where I could continue to work with HCM. I am now in a similar role to what I was in before, and can continue the same type of work and enhancements that I did at my other company.
It's very easy to use and straightforward. Everything is laid out in an easy to use pattern and can be changed, somewhat, based on user preference. The options are limited but it's a pleasant experience using the product and I can perform the tasks I need to perform quickly and without any issues.
Where it's good: Epicor HCM at a high level has a straight-forward interface for navigating to the main content sections at either the employee or HR administrator level. The interfaces are consistent throughout the application, and after a brief learning curve, one can navigate through the remainder of the interface pages in any content area without too much difficulty. HCM also has great tools for making sure the analysis of data is available and accessible to non-programmer personnel. Where it struggles: One thing working against the usability of the HCM product is the overuse of the row-selection scheme for all many to many relationships. HCM uses a "select the row from the left frame" and then "enter data corresponding to this row in the right frame" scheme for most of its data entry components. One example of overuse is the employee address entry. During the first setup of an employee or during a candidate's application, HCM allows the user to specify multiple addresses. While this functionality is desired for long-term storage, an option doesn't exist to forgo this interface type for quick initial entry for the primary use case (one address per employee). This is one example, but is particularly visible when a candidate must also bridge the learning curve.
This is one area that does need some improvement. It can be slow at time, so we had our IT look at it from our side and we had no issues, so it has to be some slowness on their side.
The product performs well. As with any software there are bugs and system enhancements needed, but there are channels in place to let Epicor know what they are so they can add to future versions. Open Enrollment and Salary Planning can be a bit slow at times.
Our team has had to contact support on a number of occasions, mostly to address a slow system and/or not being able to log in. The support is very responsive and fixes the issue within the same day. Additionally, any time we need to modify codes, BQE helps with that support and gets it turned around quickly.
There have been a lot of issues with it at first, but we've been figuring a lot of them out on our own. Needing patches to the program though is something that I didn't expect to happen as often as it does.
We had someone from Epicor come on site to do training, and we "shared" our trainer with another company who was also doing the same major upgrade. It was nice to have another company there so we could ask each other (and the trainer) questions. This allowed for more meaningful discussions during training.
As stated earlier, you won't find all of the problems and things that you would like to improve on until you implement. After go-live, you then will have a long period of adjustment as you get the data and processes to work the way that you really want them to.
I am a user and was not involved in the decision making. Tool was already in place when I joined. But comparing to other tools I have used in the past, BQE is by far the easiest to use. You do not need any training to start using this tool immediately
Epicor pales in comparison to the HRIS and report building systems listed above. Unfortunately, Epicor was implemented prior to my joining the organization. From what I was told, Epicor was chosen because of its ability to be customizable to any industry. However, what we have learned is that this isn't the whole truth. While Epicor might be able to customize to your specific industry with creating certain data fields, it still cannot function properly to meet the needs of your respective industry. For example, my industry is education. There are numerous grant propasals that we send that require specific demographic information. Consequently, when we try to run a report in Epicor, that information is never captured with accuracy which makes sending these reports for grants a herculean task, especially when these donors question our data.
Performance is not noticeably impacted by adding more users. Microsoft IIS and SQL are Epicor HCM's underlying technology and have proven reliability. In addition, IS staff are easy to find that know these technologies.
BQE Core has allowed our growing business to manage time tracking in an effective and efficient manner. We could not have effectively kept running our operation without it.
BQE Core provides all of the reports we need to do our monthly management reporting. This allows us to quickly spot problems such as capacity overloads, receivables problems, budget overruns, or timekeeping issues.
BQE Core has supported our business objective of generating more profit from projects that we undertake by allowing us to quickly and effectively monitor budget burn rates before it becomes an issue.
