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. Epicor Kinetic software offers a modular approach with robust capabilities focused on reducing costs, streamlining processes, and improving customer…
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Oracle CRM On Demand
Score 8.3 out of 10
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The basis of this offering is the Market2Lead product that Oracle acquired in 2010. It has now been fully integrated with Oracle's On Demand CRM product and is a full-featured marketing automation product with features from lead management and nurturing, to measuring marketing ROI.
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.
I think it is well suited for organizations which are large with a lot of users so as to be able to minimize the cost of operations. Also, the organization which interacts mostly with customers can use Oracle CRM on demand.
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.
Application customization is a key strength. We can create custom home page experiences for each type of user, customize object layouts to change dynamically depending on object type, and create an embedded sales process unique to our organization that helps facilitate the user through the process by specifying required fields dependent on what stage of the process they are in. The ability to customize goes directly to the success of user adoption - the fact that we can customize layouts and processes to support our internal business processes helps users make the most of the system.
Robust Reporting. The reporting and data warehouse capabilities are excellent. We have thousands of custom reports delivered in a number of ways - on home pages, on dashboards, on demand through the reporting menu, and on custom web tabs. These reports range from simple lists to complex multi-object analyses.
Ability to get data in and get data out. CRMOD makes it very easy to import data into any object. This is helpful for importing lists or making mass changes. Exporting data is equally easy, both from an administrator standpoint and for the user. Users can display a list or do a custom advanced search and then easily export the data to Excel without any admin help. They can also export from any report, which is helpful when sales data needs to be combined with other financial data in a larger analysis.
The system's workflow capabilities allow us to improve field validation, send important notifications, and enforce business process requirements.
A scripting mechanism is needed to customize the data entry forms. As any data driven system, Oracle CRM on demand is as reliable as its data is. Having sales people entering and maintaining the data you have to make sure they are doing that and not cutting corners. One way to do that is to enforce the business requirements in the entry forms.
User interface / user experience definitely can and should be improved.
It needs a way to send automatic reports on a schedule via email.
Support: as usual the Oracle support tends to be tedious and lengthy.
Compared to other competitors I find it very easy to use and learn .It has been helpful in our organisation and we have been able to manage our projects and operations well without interference.
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.
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.
Oracle app is more available on different mobile devices, Microsoft Dynamics has only Windows and Android but Oracle has both web-based, Mac, IOS. Social CRM feature is another one that Microsoft Dynamics doesn't provide. On the other hand, Microsoft Dynamics provides offline line access. Also, Oracle integrations fit our needs better. Also Ticketing system support is better.
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.
