Item: Epicor Kinetic
Rating: 8
Author: Michael Pavlica

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Epicor ERP v10 is used at Omega Plastics, Inc. as our primary means of managing and tracking our day to day activities and planning for a great overall client experience. Epicor is used from quoting through shipping, including shop floor MES. Epicor was implemented at Omega to help support our growth in the Medical Device market and improve our real-time scheduling capabilities as we both build over 300 injection molds and provide development part runs as well as low-volume production runs requiring FDA CFR820 / GMP compliance. Epicor is easy to set up, modify, and customize to our business as well as link to 3rd party apps such as Power BI or Excel. Epicor allows for real-time data analysis and financial reporting to help make decisions faster. Epicor offers both on premise and cloud solutions, providing flexibility and control at a reasonable cost. Epicor continues to add features and modules, and has integrated Mattec for real-time shop floor machine reporting, XLConnect for custom integration with Excel to provide power analytics, DocStar document management, and Manifest for direct Fed Ex/UPS integration.

Pros and Cons

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.

Return on Investment

Epicor ERP has paid for itself over the past 5 years of usage, but did not generate the 2 year ROI anticipated, as the costs of training and customization were higher than anticipated.
Epicor has helped us to visualize our scheduling constraints sooner, but has not eliminated the need for additional scheduling considerations beyond machine availability (e..g ability to tie multiple resource constraints to the same job and see the impact).
Epicor's custom dashboards have helped coordinate and communicate better between sales, program management, manufacturing and shipping, resulting in fewer missed deliveries, more timely client notifications, and less confusion on the shop floor.

Scalability

As noted, with on premise and cloud based options, and several levels of cloud-based options, Epicor is highly scalable, particularly in a cloud environment with easy upgrades to more powerful server utilization.

Post-Sale Experience

Like all vendors, Epicor is as good as the team you work with. Omega has worked with excellent consultants both inside and outside of Epicor, but has found the best consistency in working with Epicor direct. Epicor's signature program management methodology works, and our experience is that it is worth the extra cost, as you will have access to a PM within Epicor that has direct access to their key teams and team members, and they are excellent at driving results and keeping the project on task and on time.

Alternatives Considered

Made2Manage ERP, PeopleSoft Financials and IQMS EDI Translator

Epicor ERP has similar functionality to Made2Manage, but is much more flexible and has significantly more additional modules and support available. Versus PeopleSoft, it becomes an unfair comparison, as Epicor is mid-market and PeopleSoft is large-market. Having said that, Epicor is easier to both implement and use, but has far less flexibility.
IQMS is the biggest competitor if in the manufacturing space, particularly injection molding, as IQMS is fast becoming a de-facto "standard".

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Epicor ERP 10 Considerations for Mid-Market Manufacturers considering the next ERP Solution

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Epicor ERP