Epicor Eclipse

It is well suited for plumbing wholesale business, distributorship, with walk-in sales customers and a large inventory, or a manufacturing environment. I'm not sure how well it would work in a service industry like a mechanic, or consulting type of environment or a financial type industry. I don't think I would try to use it in a really small company either.

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.

As mentioned previously, Epicor Eclipse is built for the HVAC and Electrical distributor segment. It's a great package for them because of the job-specific control on orders for customers. Large orders can be created and released item-by-item on whatever schedule the customer needs. The integrated wireless warehouse functionality is also critical for large operations. However, if you're outside one of those two segments, these strengths become major performance bottlenecks. The scheduling piece is non-essential for other industries but you have to operate that way which slows things down significantly.

For medium (with growing pains!) organizations, Epicor's Eclipse software would be a great distribution and point of sale software solution and competes well with other software solutions out there. For large distributors Epicor's custom programming has the ability to tailor their software to customers exact need. I feel the cost of the system would be prohibitive to smaller distributors.

If you are an Electrical distributor, with multiple branches or multiple departments, it could be a good choice for you. It is built with a deep knowledge of your industry, which is hard to find elsewhere. To support it, it requires either expensive support contracts or knowledgeable people who have multiple years of working with the platform. For larger businesses there are other ERP's that may scale better, or have more features, but are not likely to have as many industry specific features. Depends on what downsides you can live with.

The Eclipse E-term client, in my opinion, is a game changer at the counter and in the sales field. The ability to see numerous parts of the sale is great. Using numerous windows allows one to go back and forth between jobs. The queue and messaging functions create accountability and improve performance. The "call when complete" queue, in my opinion, is a great tool that unfortunately is underutilized by most people as there can be some confusion generated by some of the statuses.

Well suited for daily activities such as entering sales and inventory tracking. Not well suited for financial reporting.

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.

To fully appreciate Eclipse, you have to understand it's processes. Once you do, all the other pieces fit together!

Wholesale distribution or Retail Sales great. Manufacturing less so.

It is still the best software package out there (at least that I'm aware of). Obviously, one needs to have the needs for what it offers. AND is willing to put in the time to learn and input reliable data.

Intuitive order entry. Ease of managing sales information, pricing, product maintenance.

Epicor meets most if not all of my expectations from a purchasing view.

For small to medium based companies I think it is a good fit, for larger companies I don't see it being a great fit to many users and to many control files to maintain in order to not allow people to do certain things. If you need them to be able to do one thing it gives them access to many other things. You would have to have a full time employee just overriding things.

I used to think that Eclipse was a great value for the cost, but I am currently thinking that there might be more value in the more expensive options.

Works well for inventory and purchasing.