Epicor for Distribution

Great option for distribution

Vorteile:

It is widely used by distributors of all kinds of industries. The independent user group is an incredible resource of users that are very helpful to everyone in the group

Nachteile:

Costs and resources needed. This is a very robust software package and will need your time to get it setup the way you want it for your business. The good news is that it can be setup for your business.

Strong, robust and flexible

Kommentare: The application's flexibility allows us to tailor the application to very specific business needs and allow bringing creativity to address our needs

Vorteile:

Deep functionalities in multiple areas Flexibility in term of technology (UDFs, business rules and screen customization capabilities)

Nachteile:

A bit late on the market for bringing a web base version and as far as mobility is concerned

Prophet 21 concerns

Kommentare: After 10 years not very happy. The items I listed as Cons are so severe they are causing my company to look ignorant and lose money.

Vorteile:

Overall the software works well for us but the cons are serious.

Nachteile:

Credit card processing does not work at all. Epicor has not corrected the obvious issues in 10 years and does not listen to the complaints. Cursor placement is not obvious it gets lost on the screen. Can't easily swap from quotes to sales orders or vice versa once you enter product. Uses way too much paper everything prints using way too much area. Epicor does not offer monthly invoicing only massive invoices at end of year. Customer has no idea what he is purchasing until he sees printed receipt, there should be a secondary monitor facing customer for pricing approvals. There are no out of the box financial reports. You have to build your own and teach yourself how to build them. After you enter your products if you hit the enter button too many times you will have no idea where your cursor has been placed. If you accidentally change the current date on the order to before the current date let's say year 2000 the prices on the receipt go to ZERO for every product. When invoicing a back order the software does not tell you what quantity is owed it only shows what was invoiced and what was ordered. You must do the math as to what is owed.

Great Product - Great Staff

Kommentare: Have been a P21 "Partner" for over 22 years. I believe that it is the best software fro Distribution on the market, although not the cheapest. They work closely with Microsoft and innovative 3rd Parties as well as internally to continually provide innovation and better performance.

Vorteile:

Information at your fingertips - inventory, orders, sales. Ease of use and scaleability. Ease of forms modification. Keeping up with modern innovations such as cloud and AI

Nachteile:

Overall system speed. Base reporting. You can always get what you want in reporting IF you know your Crystal and/or SQL.

Filled with features but slow

Kommentare: The vast amount of features allows it to be compatible with many different business models throughout several industries which can make it a little over complicated on what to do via data-entry as your company doesn't use every single piece of functionality and you have to fill in the appropriate area for what your company is using as there are allot of fields and tabs that you could have to update. So it can produce very detailed information if allot of the fields are utilized. Speed is a huge concern with this software as it has multiple layers of programming on top of an outdated platform that makes the data entry workable but painfully slow once you get used to running the software.
I am not part of the financial portion so I only gave it one star because it wouldn't let me erase and make it no stars.
See Advise to Others for more details.

Vorteile:

Scale-ability and the capability to mold to a lot of different companies business models. The Purchasing/Forecasting functionality is top notch and very mold-able to any purchasing model ranging from central purchasing down to individualized seasonal items. Once set up it will let you get away with a smaller procurement department as the system will tell you what you need to order. The vendor is good about fixing issues quickly but sometimes difficult to distinguish between an actual error and a company specific business process. There are a ton of purchasable add-on's from the Vendor them-self along with even more third party add-on's that makes this a wonderful software if you have the money and skilled personnel to support it.

Nachteile:

Scale-ability and the capability to mold to a lot of different companies business models. Since this software can mold to a large variety of business models it can make training difficult and long due to the complexities of the software's advanced features. This also makes data entry combersome as you have to know what fields to enter depending on what functionality you are using. Slow to implement vendor driven Idea's Network from user ideas. The product feels extremely slow once you get used to running the system and is glitchy because of the method chosen to release updates and advancements. Developers run a continuous improvement program with multiple releases a year so as they are designing new features at the same time they are cleaning errors and glitches rather than waiting a long time for advancements and a rock solid release. This could also be considered good and bad if you need an advancement, you don't have to wait! The companies move to have the first level of support go to India can lead to frustrations because of the communication blearier along with the new support teams are not yet very knowledgeable with the software and the level of experiences with the software is still being developed