Epicor Kinetic

Formerly Epicor ERP

Handling all types of orders - jobs, purchases, and customer orders.

MRP scheduling is very good and easily modified by part or group.

Easily getting other info about a key field by right-clicking and traveling to a new form.

RMA and DMR. Although it can handle these, the function seems like an afterthought. It isn't as smooth as the rest of Epicor.

Reporting is ok but it runs slowly. We are still using Crystal.

Barcoding in general but mostly the warehouse management part.

Querying data is very easy with the built in business activity query builder. Deploying the data in useful dashboards is easy and highly valuable

It provides all the core functionality we need to run our engineer to order business

Recent addition of the rest API allows integrations and querying of cloud data with 3rd party BI tools

The shop floor data collection screens are not very intuitive and the gui is quite dated

Report building in the SaaS environment is very clunky - it is hard to test as you develop reports

It is still not fully mobile/web compliant - it is improving, but key functions like the manufacturing data collection still needs Windows based devices to work.

User friendly

Fast

Good at finding what I need

Way too many options

Would like to see some drop downs

The boxes move easily

supply chain management (SCM)

human capital management (HCM)

Human Resources management should be improved

Integration with other Financial and HR applications

Overall security

Customization.

Scheduling.

Complicated customization.

Many of the functions which are used by most companies need to be added by users.

Inventory

Scheduling

Marketing

Sales

Streamline processes.

Compliance.

Cumbersome to implement.

Cumbersome to upgrade.

Connecting all features together and switching between screens.

No glitches or unexpected crashes.

Requires a very experience user/team to maintain.

Some features are not flexible and require change of process to conform.

Epicor does a lot of things and being such a massive software it's hard to talk about what it does well, but I would say from my perspective it is easy to manage and once set up it runs fairly consistently and has a good amount of uptime compared to previous versions.

Epicor ERP is highly customizable and also has a new REST API that can be utilized to do even more than previous versions.

Install is complicated and upgrading is a major event requiring all branches of your business to test and test and test some more.

Support... It's kind of just ok, especially with more complex issues, a single call can drag out for months if they cannot find a fix right away.

They currently have a great support department.

It is easy to use with a pretty good user interface.

They have good user training materials and resources.

It is a very slow product. We are a pretty large company with a lot of concurrent users. As such, the product runs very slow. Our users are constantly complaining about their system "clocking."

It is pretty buggy. We are constantly uncovering bugs or quirks in the system. You can do something one time and it works fine, but turn around and it will fail or not work exactly right, even though you've done the same thing

The order release process is extremely unfriendly and tedious. We get complaints from our users all the time about it.

It lacks some of the features that other larger ERP packages contain. As a result, we had to write a lot of custom applications outside of the system.

Epicor has a great dashboard and reports capabilities.

Easily accessible from one module to the next, very user-friendly interface.

Ability to setup MRP and extremely user Data Management Tool to import mass amounts of changes or updates to parts and BOM.

Personalizations and customizations getting lost after updates.

Webex's should be recommended more often for users having issues

More tools for users to fix own issues

Ability to create custom reports

Ability to tailor the software to current business practices

User friendly

Planning module is not intuitive

Engineering workbench is cumbersome when doing repetitive entries. Should have ability to copy and paste entries on a mass scale.

Whenever there is an upgrade there should be more detail on the changes.

Most important---Epicor ERP keeps technology up to date with meaningful updates and revisions so that we will never have another legacy system again!

Epicor ERP gives you the opportunity to have access to your data and just about do anything with it so that you can see and format how you need it.

Access other areas needed without having to find and open more menu options. Just right click and open with.

Being able to see and have excel manipulation and capability within Financial reporting instead of having to use Excel Connect.

Having to close the entire program to see new Menu items or data pool refresh.

Some windows need to be saved after each box within the window before you can continue-instead of one save per window when complete or auto save.

Ease of use

Information availability

The different modules available for our business

Some of the logic on how things are calculated or updated

The SSRS reporting system

How each program or file interfaces within the system

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.

Epicor's costing features could use improvement. Although excellent in either a make to order or make to stock environment, Epicor has trade-offs when used in a mixed-mode environment. Of particular concern is when partial shipments are made during a production run without the job quantity being changed when closed short and a new job issued. Unless this is done, Epicor may under or over-cost early shipments and then "reconcile" this at job closing, resulting in erratic financial results on 2 shipments from the same job.

Epicor's gross margin report stops updating with actual costs as soon as a "ship" transaction is created. For most companies this will not be an issue, however, in an environment where shipments may take place before all costs are in, this skews the margin reports greatly, resulting in much higher margins from the manufacturing reports than what can be expected on the financials. Fortunately, the production detail report will always be correct; however, there is no reason why the gross margin report can't be modified to include "ADJ-CST" transactions which would correct for this, however, by default, Epicor's standard margin report does not use this functionality.

Epicor has great flexibility in screen customization, however, it isn't intuitive in making these changes, therefore, this feature set, which could significantly reduce data input times, goes mostly unused.

Epicor has a built-in ability to generate quick queries, however, fails to take advantage of recent innovations in query development that would make it easier for novice users to generate their own results without IT help. With the advent of AI, this is a future improvement opportunity.

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.

It is hard for me to think of something I don't like. However, the physical inventory process could be done better. It doesn't work for us as we use what are called phantom assemblies, and I have not found any ERP system that handles that out of the box correctly.

Out of the box functionality -- one program with everything you need to run the business

Ability to build BPMs rather than full-scale customizations

Knowledgeable implementation team

More robust in-program training features

Better coordination between operational and financial implementation consultants

More robust purchasing/materials procurement module with an out-of-the-box capability to manage purchases by PPV

Manufacturing and shop floor activities

Inventory

Quoting

Implementation was hard, but newer versions of Epicor are better.

Provides mostly error-free key functionality.

Provides tool kit to enable us to develop our own queries and reports.

Consultancy - we are still suffering from the poor advice by Epicor consultants we were given during our implementation.

Consultancy - it is near impossible to get prompt consultancy support from Epicor.

Account Management - I don't feel like a valued customer of Epicor and my requests are not dealt with promptly.

Epiccare - some tickets are handled promptly and well, but sometimes the responses feel like delaying tactics e.g. we report a problem that has caused a data anomaly that we say we cannot replicate and the reply comes back to ask us to replicate it!

Cloud storage

Frequent updates and fixes

Configurator for production is a plus.

VIN generation

Closing of orders to invoices at month end would be better than daily

Smoother updates for custom modules

Cloud is a little slower than the server-based system was

Our version evolved from Vantage, and to be honest, I'm not really impressed yet. I've seen good examples so am aware it's due to implementation errors, rather than Epicor shortcomings.

Unfortunately, our version of the product configurator is very slow.

The need for well educated/trained consultants to get a proper implementation should be addressed well by Epicor, as this also determines user experience to a great extent. There is no true fall-back for improper implementation.

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?

Allowing access to the back-end data through BAQs and MSSQL is very important for pulling reports and making sense of data

Epicor DMT Tool for importing data is very important because manual entry is time-consuming

Make customizing screens easier. Epicor places importance on the fact that Epicor is very customizable, however, it is very hard for the average user to customize anything. You need a programmer/admin and it's very costly to hire someone to do it. Needs to be easier.

The whole Epicor experience is not very user-friendly. i.e. why is there a customer entry and customer tracker screen? That's 1980's thinking. It should be one screen with permissions based fields.

Epicor's search feature is not very good. They call it the "Google" search for Epicor. It's nothing like Google. It doesn't provide suggestions, you have to select menu search or enterprise search. It only updates once a day. It's not even accessible from the home screen!

The menu is a waste of time. Like I said before, who uses a menu these days? Since when did you go on Amazon.com and drill down to the products from the menu? Google killed menus years ago.

The SSRS reports are garbage. Ugly and unusable out of the box, and very hard to customize.

Giving the users the ability to customize. This helps because everyone likes to see different things.

The scheduling Modules. The ability to global schedule gives the shop a better look at real time information.

The ability to create custom dashboards and reports. It lets a company look at information that means more to them. The standard reports don't always give the best information or the detail that is needed.

Lack of detail in reports. Some reports don't show all the detail that is needed.

The time it takes to get support. They take a couple of days to respond to issues the are a high priority

List views having too useless information in the default view. Some of the list views in some modules have a lot of useless information, but don't include some of the more useful information. This is just for our company though could be different for others.

Inside out architecture provides consistent and required function integration (ie. no bolt on's) while providing integration with most popular software where required.

Fairly robust and flexible material (MRP) and job scheduling functionality. Provides flexibility to use many key scheduling criteria to fine tune capabilities to match business/site requirements.

Flexibility to enforce same or modified business rules, security model, reporting, etc for each business/location.

Job costing and analysis is flexible and easy to set up and maintain.

Standard implementation methodology needs to be modified to better address use of company data for robust testing and improved data migration.

Consulting bench (a number of highly experienced and available consultants) not large enough. Some third-party implementation partners need better and more up to date training.

Data collection very tailored to discrete manufacturing; need more flexibility to meet specific requirements/processes for business with other manufacturing and/or services models.

Epicor has a pretty good project management module. We are able to set up projects with multiple phases as needed and track costs at both a phase level and top project level. You can use the system to assign tasks to employees working on the project and track assignments that way. Under each phase we create an Epicor "job" that can store all the parts that we need to purchase or fabricate for a project. Then we can track what parts have been purchased, received, and shipped for the project.

Epicor is set up to have a lot of features that most users probably aren't going to use, but it is convenient to have most of what you need available. Then, you can hide parts of the program you won't need.

Possibly the best thing about Epicor is that it has a lot of customization tools, and the system allows you to customize it in a lot of ways so you can make it look and behave how your organization needs. One very strong area of the customization is the ability to create information dashboards where you can show any type of data that you like to see. A great example of this is a Project Management Dashboard we built that allows all our employees to see how the projects are doing and what their assigned tasks are.

Expandability. This is another great way that Epicor is customizable. As an ERP system Epicor is primarily a bunch of tables. And thankfully, Epicor allows you to add new fields to the tables, so when we want to show what kind of paint goes on our parts, or if a part is purchased or fabricated, we can add fields for those items to the part table, and use it as if those were built in fields. You can add new tables, so we have a place to store lists of all the paint choices (or anything else you want to keep track up).

Maybe this was really smooth, but it seemed like implementation was a lot of work. As part of a 4 person implementation team, it took us a month or so of going through tutorials, the help files, and meeting with Epicor consultants to learn how we wanted to use Epicor (that month was pretty light, maybe 5-6 hours per week for each of us). Then it took about 3 months setting up Epicor to meet our needs. (The 4 of us each worked 25-30 hours a week during those 3 months on the implementation since we still had production work to do)

Epicor can be overwhelming for new users. Our normal users have a hard time at first getting used to it because there is so much to see, learn and do in it, epecially for people with less technical expertise.

As the person on the implementation team in charge of customizations, my biggest complaint is the lack of documentation on programming in Epicor. While they do have great documentation on how to use many of their built in customization tools, they give you the ability to write code in C# that should allow you to do anything. But, there is very little to no documentation on the API (Application Programming Interface). Most other programs will have a large help file where users can see the thousands of functions available to program within the system with info on what the functions do, how they are accessed and what inputs they need and sample code for each function. With Epicor.. nope, nothing. Maybe if you buy their SDK for another $24,000 they will have a help file included with that. I don't know.