Epicor Kinetic is well suited to handle the needs of manufacturing companies. My organization has a diverse product mix and operates in the custom manufacturing space. The flexibility of the software provides the ability to meet the evolving needs of our customers with standard functionality.
Epicor's user interface is easily customizable so that users can focus their main access screen to support just those functions that are relevant to their work day; helping to avoid menu clutter and confusion.
Epicor advanced scheduling provides true drag and drop customizable dashboard with real-time updates to allow users to easily track jobs on the shop floor in an easy to understand Gantt-style (MS Project style) graphical interface.
Epicor's customizable dashboards are also updateable, adding the ability for real-time collaboration and updates. From nearly every key field in Epicor, even on dashboards, the ability to drill down to source data is one "right click" away.
Epicor reporting uses standard Microsoft SQL SSRS instead of 3rd party add-ins such as Crystal Reports. This improves speed significantly during report generation, and ensures a common platform for upgrades without concerns about rewriting reports to incompatible versions.
Epicor has a "Google-like" search feature (Enterprise Search) that is top notch. It literally allows you to search on any key word in your data set and brings back relevant results in various groupings to make it simple to quickly get to the data you need. This is the favorite feature of new users.
Interaction with different products. We use advancedMES and quickship and there is a bit of a disconnect between Kinetic and those two programs. I wish there was a better connection between the two where I can easily manage what aspects influences each program.
Documentation. There have been a few times where I feel that I can get a better answer from the epiuser forum than the actual help guide.
Error handling. Some errors are very vague which can make my job a bit harder. There have been a few errors where the only solution was guessing and checking a traced output.
There is always room for improvement! I've used Great Plains ERP/MS Dynamics and Epicor my entire career. both do some things really well. Both could learn from each other. The KInetic user interface is much better than the classic windows overall. Please keep adding more functionality to the core financials!!! You need the accountants to be on your side.
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.
With my former employer, we used ISAH-7, including couplings to Autocad (with BOM-integration) and Account View for financial reporting. At this company, I was also doing on-site support and report updates and year-closing, which would normally cost me just 4-5 working days. With another trading company, I was involved in the merger from King to AccountView and with a third, I was supporting developments of web-based forms in Exact. All these companies were only somewhat smaller than the present employer, but the software seemed to be working much better to company needs than with present setup.
At first, it is difficult to convince every one of its immense capabilities but once the scalability is tapped into some it becomes easier to show and convince how well suited the system is for many disciplines. With constant upgrades and updates, there really just isn't a limit to what can be accomplished.
