Eclipse works, but only if you're in the right industry.
May 04, 2018

Eclipse works, but only if you're in the right industry.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Epicor Eclipse

Eclipse is used as the primary software of our company. We run sales, purchasing, operations and finance on it. Generally it is one of the better ERP systems available in the electrical distribution space. It has an inherent understanding of how products, projects, orders, and warehouses are setup for our industry. It's greatest strength is probably the ways in which it has setup the product/price line/pricing data to meet our industry's unique needs. There are also some strong drawbacks to using the system, which we try to overcome with either 3rd party add on products that integrate with Eclipse, or custom programming we do in house.

Pros

  • Transaction - we are able to rebuild inventory and financial history step by step if there is ever an issue.
  • The pricing engine is fairly robust, and allows us needed control over sells strategies.
  • Parts of the system are editable, and we are able to quickly iterate new solutions for internal customers.

Cons

  • Their support has gotten worse over the years. They fired a large portion of staff in favor of cheaper new hires. It is getting slowly better over time as their support people are gaining experience, but decades of institutional knowledge was lost. Response time can vary wildly depending, which is troubling when you have an immediate need. They have made a partial mea culpa, but the situation is not fully remedied.
  • The user interface is clunky. The original interface, E-term, is a terminal based system (think DOS). A few years ago they rebuilt it using Java and called the new interface Solar, which is a more point and click, windows friendly version. Solar is slower, and so has been difficult for us to get the user adoption we've needed. In addition, any customization we do doesn't work in Solar. Now they have announced a new road-map to make it all web-based. Good luck to them, but it seems they spend all their time playing catch-up instead of making deep system improvements.
  • There are significant gaps in what Eclipse is able to do. Sometimes there are third party products (Proof of Delivery, E-commerce, Tax, etc.), and sometimes Epicor offers in house solutions (Job Management, EDI, etc.). In either case, there are a string of products we have to integrate and maintain to make Eclipse functional. Most of them require support contracts, and have varying degrees of support.
Yes - SHIMS. This was before my time and so do not have any specific knowledge on why they changed or the ease of transition.
  • Eclipse works for us. We live & die by sales, warehousing, delivery, AR, AP, purchasing, pricing, and product data. It does all of these well such that our core business is tightly aligned in our business processes.
  • Because Eclipse has very little ability outside it's core competencies, and development form Epicor has been lagging, we are required to find 3rd party or custom solutions. This erodes our investment in Eclipse, and costs us time & money that the platform could capture if it invested properly.
There aren't any better industry specific ones, but I have looked at Dynamics 365, SAP, Odoo, and others to see if a more robust, configurable, ERP could be customized to suit our industry. Not yet, but the balance is tipping away from Eclipse.
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.

Epicor Eclipse Feature Ratings

6.9
Accounts payable
7
Accounts receivable
6
Global Financial Support
7
Primary and Secondary Ledgers
8
Journals and Reconciliations
7
Configurable Accounting
6
Standardized Processes
7
6.5
Billing Management
6
Period Close
7
7.7
Inventory tracking
8
Automatic reordering
8
Location management
7
7.0
Pricing
8
Order entry
7
Credit card processing
6
Cost of goods sold
8
Order Orchestration
6
Payroll Management ()
Not Rated
5.3
Dashboards
5
Standard reports
5
Custom reports
6
3.5
API for custom integration
3
Plug-ins
4
4.0
Role-based user permissions
4
Grants Management ()
Not Rated
6.0
Budgeting and Forecasting
6
Project Costing
7
Cost Capture
6
Capital Project Management
4
Project Revenue Recognition
7
5.0
Project Planning and Scheduling
6
Task Insight for Project Managers
4
2.7
Bids Analyzed and Compared
1
Contract Repository
1
Requisitions-to-Purchase Orders Integrated
6
2.0
Risk Repository
1
Issue Detection
3
3.5
Transportation Planning and Optimization
3
Transportation Execution Management
2
Trade and Customs Management
2
Warehouse Workforce Management
7
3.3
Production Process Design
3
Production Management
4
Work Execution
3
Manufacturing Costs
3
6.7
Forecasting
6
Inventory Planning
7
Performance Monitoring
7
Product Lifecycle Management ()
Not Rated

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