Epicor Kinetic vs. Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain Management (SCM)

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.

Incentivized

Oracle SCM Cloud is extensively used in my organization for a complete
Supply chain. We use all the Procure to Pay modules starting with
Procurement, Order management, and Financial modules. We also use Product
Information Management and Product Development Management modules to create and maintain items and products that we sell. These modules are interfaced with Inventory Management for shipping and supply chain demand and supply planning as well. Analytics is integrated with all these modules so it is very useful to keep track of metrics. However, if you are not using Sales Cloud and use another CRM system, there could be some hiccups in syncing the system if you don't have a middleware.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Allows you to visualize your data in more graphical manners.
• Provides a solid configurable forecasting engine.
• It's user configurable which helps to deliver the results you are looking for.
• Product is keeping up with the speed of innovation - constantly being improved and pushed out to the customers.

Incentivized

• Consultants should be very well trained to make sure program integrity is maintained during challenging implementations.
• There should be an improvement on answering questions raised, especially upon migration issues.
• When is Epicor aware of improper/incorrect implementation they might proactively offer improvement support?

Incentivized

• UI - Needs a definite update. Tool can do wonders if UI is intuitive.
• Excel based data doesn't upload easily.
• No open APIs, integration is not possible with other tools.
• Extra charges for a module for integration.
• Implementation is not easy.

Incentivized

It is a good service to have people update and collaborate with I also like the ease of it. It keeps the stock of materials accountable

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Oracle SCM is best suited for Small & Mid Sized Business, whereas SAP SCM is best suited for large scale businesses. Oracle SCM has Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supplier Relationship Management (SCM) integrations which is missing in SAP SCM. Oracle supports modular integration and electronic data integration (EDI) which was one of the pre-requisites of the client.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• There is a large reduction in man hours spent attempting to manually create the traceability matrix
• There is a strong involvement of different BUs and collaboration on the requirements creation process
• The time to develop and approve requirements has been shortened

Incentivized