Epicor Eclipse is an end-to-end business system for wholesale distributors, as well as electrical, HVAC, plumbing and PVF businesses. Eclipse simplifies complex distribution processes found in today’s dynamic supply chains.
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Sage 100cloud
Score 7.7 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Sage 100 (or Sage 100cloud is a business management software offering a broad range of modules designed to meet the many needs of virtually any business. It encompasses financial operations and accounting, payroll, business intelligence, CRM, eBusiness, manufacturing and distribution.
Eclipse is well suited for quick order entry where the source is a formal purchase order document or a phone call with a known customer. In these scenarios the order entry process is quick, and order processing is smooth even if the customer has a lot of "special" requests like shipping part today and holding the rest or shipping some of the order to other addresses. Eclipse also works well if you have a good database of products, especially in searching for products where only partial information is known or finding existing orders where all you know for sure is the customer. It is not particularly well suited for Point of Sale where a walk-in customer who doesn't have an account wants products for which part numbers are not known, due to the requirements to release an order for a customer with no credit.
Sage 100 has been well suited for running the monthly accounts receivable and accounts payable aging reports. This helps us track our accounts that need to be collected and payments that need to be made. Our field operations team has been slow and unwanting to adopt the Sage Field Ops just because they're resistant to change and technology. It's less appropriate for really detailed accounting reports spanning for long periods of time with all accounts because it takes a very long time to run and process.
Sales Order tracking, even returns are strengths of Epicor Eclipse. It can be set up to match returns to previous orders so that the correct credits are applied. It is capable of setting up contract pricing as well as matrix level pricing according to sales velocity or individual customer buyer programs.
Purchasing can be set up to work by full line buys or short buys while still maintaining a balanced inventory level of vendor line product.
Vendor Invoices and purchase orders are easily matched up for payment and the diverse reporting features are able to provide multi-faceted views of Product Sales, Items with No Sales, or Sales or Purchasing trends, just to name a few.
It is also tracking warehouse operation in both RF and non-RF environments, or a combination of the two.
Sage 100 at times will simply not connect to our server, we get remote support & all is well but, that issue tends to happen 2-3X a year.
Other than the above, I really can't complain. Coming from a more custom U.V. type database that used a whole bunch of codes to navigate, I think Sage 100 is 10x easier to use.
I use it every day and can't see a reason why I would stop unless I started a new job. If I were to leave my present position, the new job would be much more attractive if they were Eclipse users.
I would put this out to bid, if I were at the same organization. There have been a lot of improvements and changes in enterprise software and my preference would be to find a good web-based or cloud-based tool. Lower overall cost of ownership and improved efficiency would be my target criteria for a rebid of this.
This is very easy to use for someone that hasn't ever used the system before. Despite any preconceived notions about how a system should function they can learn this and become efficient with really not a lot of effort. I have used many systems and this is probably one of the easiest I have ever had to learn to navigate and use.
Overall Sage 100 has been pretty user friendly. If we have a question on anything, we are able to contact our implementation rep who helps us right away. Some of the Sage Field Operations may not be as intuitive for our field personnel to use. I wish the reports ran faster so that we could run and put together many reports quickly at once.
I haven't experienced any outages in the two years I have been using the system. It is always available as long as the computer is up. The only time I have seen it not be available was on occasions where we lost internet, or power and then we lost access to everything, not just Epicor Eclipse.
Everything in this system moves fairly quickly, that may be in part because we are a small company with only 21 users on the system at a time, or it may just be a the way the Epicor Eclipse works for any size company with any number of users. I can only speak for what I know and say that it is fast for our purposes.
The tier 1 support is trying, and sometimes they are successful. Sometimes they aren't. This topic isn't as black and white as the questions might suggest. Currently their Tier 1 support team is over seas, all items automatically go to Tier 1 and then when they can't help they either escalate it or tell me they need to check with someone else and they will get back to me. If they escalate me to Tier 2, then the issue comes back to the States and the support is usually at a higher knowledge/experience level and it can get resolved fairly quickly. If they don't escalate, then it might take weeks and multiple follow ups on my part before I either get a satisfactory resolution or finally get escalated.
The training classes that I have attended have been top notch. The presenters are extremely knowledgeable on their subject matter, including real-world application of the system. They aren't just software techs training end users, they seem to be end users that have become experts in the over functionality and capabilities of the system.
The on-line training is very good, and it is taught by the same people that do the live in-person training sessions. The difficult part of it is, asking questions about your specific company's nuances or special circumstances. I don't remember if you can access the on-line training sessions after you have taken them for reminders purposes, but if so that is a great asset.
I don't really know about the implementation, it was back in 1998 and I didn't start here until 2016. By the time I started here they had been running it for a number of years and most of the people that were here when it was implemented are no longer here, and the ones that are don't really have much to say about how the implementation went either bad or good.
We had an advantage in implementing the tool in that our director of Ops had been part of the team implementing the ERP for other users so we knew what to expect and were able to avoid a lot of the challenges people sometimes face with implementations. However, the process still took far longer than desired.
Most of my experience has been with Epicor's Prophet 21. For most distribution verticals, Prophet 21 is the only way to go. The comparison I've drawn is this: Prophet 21 is like a ferrari. Epicor Eclipse is like a reliable donkey. Both get you from point A to point B but Prophet 21 is going to get you there much quicker and with the kind of insight into your business that will help you thrive.
I didn't choose Sage 100 ERP -- it was already in use when I started at the organization over five years ago. It has the same types of pros and cons as other big hulking software suites meant to power the infrastructure of corporations. It's slow, tough to customize, and doesn't connect well with other software. It does bring all the information into one place, which is great
I don't really know about the scalability. It's the same as it was when I started, I do know that you can buy more user licenses, but I think they come in packs of 5, which can be a problem if you only need 1 and will never use the other 4. But, again I'm not sure on that.
One of the main positive ROI impacts has been the constant upgrading and adding of new features to keep the software user friendly, relative, and robust.
Our credit manager has said it has made their job easier with daily reports to catch pricing discrepancies and straighten out before they go to invoice makes us look better.
With the addition of sale analytics it has given our sales force tools and new approaches to our customer base which has raised profitability.
Sage 100 overall had a very positive overall ROI for the business. All users were making decisions based on the same information and valuable time was no longer spent trying to analyze data from a number of sources.
Moving the warehouses to using Sage 100 reduced the operating expense of the distribution side of the business by 5% on an annual basis (~$100K).
