Epicor Eagle vs. MicroStrategy Analytics

My area covers our general ledger accounting. Let me tell you how much I appreciate that Eagle will fully track the entire journal entry of a sales transaction! Our previous ERP provider did not track the Cost of Goods Sold and Sales Tax portion of a sales. It was really labor-intensive to fill the missing gaps. Switching to Eagle N Series has saved the company up to 40% in various labor costs because the reporting is accurate and detailed.

Incentivized

MSTR is great for any organization that is looking for a way to deliver complicated data in an uncomplicated way. From business teams to marketing and finance, several departments benefit from using MSTR to keep track of KPIs enabling teams to make optimizations along the way. MSTR provides great visual representations of data enabling team members to distill thousands of data points into easily digestible charts and graphs

Incentivized

• Mobile applications like Mobile Manager, Mobile Lookup, and Pricing Planner put resources in the palm of your hand to use in the store, at trade shows, or at your competition.
• Eagle N has powerful promotional tools with Dynamic Promotions to keep your Marketing fresh and current.
• By combining Compass Analytics with Eagle N you can create almost any query, simple of difficult. This powerful tool lets you simplify difficult research, you can easily find a customer's receipt from ten years ago.
• Functions like ITR (Inventory Tracking Record) ICL (Inventory Change Log) let you quickly determine the electronic history of a sku. It allows you to see what, why, how and who changed a record.

Incentivized

• They sell the product well, and make promises you will actually believe
• "checks the box" for most features a company would need. Doesn't actually deliver them though
• They answer the phone in a timely manner. Can't answer your questions or provide support, but the queue time isn't bad
• They have online documentation. It's not up to date, and likely doesn't reflect the version of software you are using, but hey... they can point to it.

• Adding the same SKU in 2 different lines does not work in Eagle N Series.
• In the IMU function, I would like to have the SKU field drill down to show the last 5 SKUs I was working on.
• I would like to see the check printing feature simplified.
• I would like to have more choices of fields that could print on our invoices.
• In POS, it would be nice to have an easy viewer available to see what A/R customers owe.

Incentivized

• The graph options are not as robust as an Excel user might want.
• The metadata layer can sometimes be slower, and it takes a long time for reports to run.
• Viewing the data feed entered can be cumbersome at times, in terms of validation with reports.

Incentivized

Eagle N series is a great tool. It really compliments the Eagle 4 Windows. The additional features are really nice to have. You can never have too much information. It helps me make better, wiser decisions. Eagle N allows compass functions without having to leave what function I'm in and see the additional information. GREAT TOOL!

Incentivized

I would always choose to renew MicroStrategy as long as they lead the market in features, functionality and price. The support of MicroStrategy is timely and professional, I frequently get answers to my questions within 24 hours and normally have solutions within 48 hours. Training available for MicroStrategy completely covers everything required to be able to expertly use MicroStrategy and understand data warehousing.

Incentivized

There is a lot of information provided in Epicor. From Simple viewers to detailed information for the owner of the company, there is a lot of information. Also, let me mention, the Audit information. From a simple sku change to deletions, everything is recorded in an audit trail. It really helps to stop a thief or simply help you see what you did so you can undo it. Epicor also has a great security system. Their security bits allow you to decide who can perform what function. There are a lot of options to the funtions. This allows you to customize functions to your operation. We are not all alike!

Incentivized

The standard grid reporting could look more like the styling and object used for the Import and Visual Insight products. In addition, object properties almost seem to be hidden when first using the product. It's as if they are asking the engineers to only use the presets we make available...and, these presets are 10+ years old. On the positive side, Microstrategy seems to be the only product, not named Cognos, which can scale to Big Data. The product is "hackable" via the SDK or tricking the Intelligence Server to do uncommon things. The Microstrategy development team also seems to be very involved with their OEM partners; especially when it comes to features and enhancements. A large majority of the improvements we suggested have made it into the product or on the roadmap for future enhancements. Only suckas fall for the shiny objects from most other vendors; Microstrategy is really the only choice for Enterprise BI.

I've never had an issue with MicroStrategy not being available due to MicroStrategy application malfunction. It is very robust and only failures I've seen were due to user error or the platform the machine running the service failed some how.

Incentivized

Being able to customize the performance based on the business need is extremely powerful. Proper configuration and understanding of the usage pattern is key, if the technical ability of the architect is not at top level, then the product will not be configured correctly which will lead to poor performance.

Incentivized

When I call in for support, they connect to my problem, view my computer with me and walk me through a solution and fixing the problem. They educate you and explain in simple terms what they are doing, how and why they fix it. This way, you understand and feel more confident moving forward and I am more efficient using the functions next time. They really are very patient.

Incentivized

Good user community. Support team is available if you are under AMC. You get decent support after raising the support ticket. If it is product bug they will inform you and let you know which patch will resolve the same.

Incentivized

I have attended many trainings offered by MicroStrategy; both distance and in-person training. I earned my CRD (Certified Report Developer) certification via the online training. I found the training to be well organized and concise. Overall I will definitely continue to increase my knowledge with MicroStrategy via the online training offering.

The process, from my point of view, was handled very well. It was a smooth transaction with lots of support both on site and by phone. All questions were answered and everything was explained each step of the way. A lot of information and support were provided including decisions on options and securities.

Incentivized

We measured following KPI for the success

• Increase in Business Feeds Loads
• Reduction in Controllers Manual Work.
• Conversion of Manual Work into Systematic Workflows.
• Increase in Customer Spend
• Reduction in Service costs
• Reduction in time-to-market for new campaigns
• Increase in cross sell and Up sell
• Error reduction in customer Identification
• Existing client retained

Incentivized

We were already Eagle customers when a guru from our parent company recommended we switch some of the computers on the system over to N Series. Now that I primarily use N Series, it is especially when I find myself on a computer that does not have it, that I realize how much more intuitive N Series seems to be set up.

Incentivized

Tableau is probably MicroStrategy Analytic's biggest competitor I've noticed over time, and I'm not sure why. Tableau only covers visualizations independently for each business user, which then creates the issues of every employee creating their own version of the data, and then you have 20 versions of the truth. A enterprise data warehouse and MicroStrategy's Visual Insight is a better method.

Incentivized

This software is extremely scaleable, one can add more core servers which performs as a load balancing. The configurations available to manage usage patterns and daily activity are as high a caliber as any other enterprise level software. This product can be installed on both a windows and unix platform allow for integration on a budget.

Incentivized

• Epicor does provide almost a real time reporting dashboard so we have insight into our sales data and numbers necessary to make price changes if needed that have affected our bottom line and GM.
• Our insight into certain products and the cost drivers continues to improve with the GM detail capabilities in business advisor.

Incentivized

• MicroStrategy was helpful for reducing the amount of time we needed to spend number crunching large data sets, and in doing so, allowed me as the primary users to spend more time gleaning insights from the data that in turn informed our leadership team to make strategic decisions.
• By creating numerous canned reports available to all members of the team through email distribution or basic access to the platform, we were able to reduce the time I spent showing people how to pull the data in Microsoft Excel by nearly 40% .
• We ended up needing to make many changes to the way our DMP was feeding data into MicroStrategy due to incorrect reporting that caused complications in accounting and finance.