Epicor for Distribution Reviews

Great option for distribution

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

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

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Prophet 21 concerns

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

Easy to use

Comments: We are using Epicor Eclipse (Eterm) to handle our accounting functions, financial reporting functions, sales, purchases, inventory control and whatever else I may have forgotten. We rely on this system, almost to the point of live or die by it.

Pros:

I like how easy it is to actually use (after set up). I also like how easy it is to learn how to use, especially if you have some previous experience using another brand ERP software. The point upgrades are extremely easy to perform as well.

Cons:

There are a few things I don't like about this software. The report writer is tricky to use if you only write reports once every couple of years, you can easily forget how it is done/what is necessary. There are certain processes that aren't clearly laid out in the system like hot keys in certain screens aren't laid out.

Mostly does what you need it to do

Comments: Customer service generally respond to tickets quickly, but oftentimes one representative will tell us something is impossible or not part of baseline functionality, only to have a different rep eventually tell us that it is possible and then show us how to do it. This has happened several times.
When putting in a request for a custom script (as we are told to do for many requests), it takes weeks or months to get the issue resolved.

Pros:

Through DynaChange, administrators have great control over which modules/screens their users can use. There are many ways to customize the various modules, either by groups of like users or user-specific. Once learned, the software contains everything needed to run the business; Accounting, Inventory Management, Order Processing, etc.

Cons:

Not user-friendly. Users have complained there are many steps (more than is typical) needed to do basic tasks. This is only an 'out of the box' product for very basic use. There are many customizations needed to make the product do what the salesmen say it can do. Hosted software has several drawbacks, such as updates to forms sometimes not being pushed through properly, or having changes to forms revert because the changes did not properly propogate to all clustered servers. The same can be said about changes to printers on the network; settings will be updated and the next day they will revert to the old settings. When a data import has an error, it is not always easy to decipher what the error means.

Been with P21 product for 23 years. Have not wanted to change ever

Comments: The ability to communicate everything about inventory, sales, purchase with everyone on our team at the same time. It is rather intuitive so training is fairly easy. Month end procedures are documented and easy to do.

Pros:

The ability to see all facets of history in every ribbon/window and can go way back in time. The inventory module allows for us to go into our warehouse directly to where the item is and we can see costs, sales, quotes, etc.

Cons:

The accounting package is staid and doesn't allow for easy access to edit. Records are like pictures so you can't edit rather than documents you can. Also, support was by far the overriding reason I crowed about P21/Epicor but not anymore. To often I get people who tell me to look at a solution in their data base rather than assisting me with my current issue, or don't even realize that I am hosted.

Easy to use but hard to report

Comments: I am a user, administrator and analyst for Epicor AVP.

Pros:

AVP is very easy to use from a user standpoint, and not too bad from an administrators standpoint. You can easily maneuver through the software and update the areas you need to, and the support is fantastic. I have to say that Epicor has the best support from all of the different ERP systems I have used, well minus, Sybase/Optimized NALCOMIS support, but that is the US Navy.

Cons:

Reporting is difficult. There isn't a real place to pull reports. We have a Datapoint which can tell us how the tables are connected, but cannot pull real reports. I am using Power Query, and some of the things I want to pull will not calculate right.

Great software that can be tailored to suit your needs

Pros:

Ease of use, adaptability when needing to add a specific feature or field.

Cons:

"Tabbing" to jump from field to field can sometimes get messy. When it's first opened you can use the tab key to jump from different fields like any other GUI. However, after some use for reasons unknown, eventually the "tab track" will slip off the rails and suddenly hitting the "Tab" key just makes it cycle through the top row of fields instead of the entire interface.

Prophet 21 Excels at Distribution Management

Comments: Prophet 21 has been a great ERP solution for us that has had a profound impact on our efficacy. We have also been able to reduce inventory substantially by using Prophet 21's inventory management tools.

Pros:

Ease of use. Prophet 21 application designers have put a lot of thought into making Prophet 21 simple to use yet powerful enough to meet the demands of thousands of distribution businesses. Open database. I love the open database architecture. It allows me all the functionality I need to write custom reports for my business. Fits a wide range of business requirements.

Cons:

Lots of stuff in there we just don't use. Can sometimes be slow aggregating data. Artificial limit on the number of windows that can be open in the software at one time. Most computers today are more than capable of handling a much higher limit.

Prophet 21 Since 2004

Comments: We incorporate more government regulation obstacles into the software. The software helps so we can plan our next strategic steps.

Pros:

Adaptability makes the software current with economic trends. We can update with modern technology and still use with legacy equipment.

Cons:

Glitches that occur during product revision updates. More proof testing, with novice and seasoned users prior to release date might expose issues before a release.

Solid ERP, not great with customizing features

Pros:

Is a solid system, can't remember the last time we had a problem in the last 3 years.

Cons:

Is hard to find support outside of EPICOR and is not easy to customize.

Takes a minute to understand

Comments: P21 has a lot of room to grow, it is great bare bones, and definitely a company you have to be patient with.

Pros:

many features, room to expand, personalization, lots of networking options, helpful forum, multi functional

Cons:

pricey, not intuitive, to take the learning courses it costs more money, features come with a basic versions and a "premium" paid for version, such as dynachange and crm

AP/AR orders

Comments: Easy access to information

Pros:

the connection between all the windows. going from orders to invoices and back. the pages are set up nicely

Cons:

it takes much too long to open a new window. When I want to open a new window, i have to wait almost 10=15 seconds. sounds silly, but in today's day everything is so immediate

good to use difficult data extract

Pros:

functions are great and fits for distribution centers but not for service and repair orders in cases like this it falls short

Cons:

crystal reports are very difficult to use i refer to have my data extract all in regular excel where all the data are in the same line.

Easy to learn, use and expand

Pros:

We can have a new employee functional in under a week. Support is great. Extensibility allows us to customize what we need. Always room to expand, no constraints.

Cons:

The software seems to crash easily. Slightly quirky in terms of the software being very rigid (you can't do some things on the fly that would be beneficial).

Epicor Prophet 21

Comments: I did learn the system really fast. I love the ease of access.

Pros:

What I like most is how organized P21 is. It keeps all the orders organized and clean. It makes it easy to see what's happening with the order.

Cons:

This software can be very glitchy at times. There are times where you can be in the middle of doing something and it will completely shut down on you and close you out of the application.

Epicor user and interface

Comments: Our company has shipped product without quality verification. It has caused several customer complaints.

Pros:

The Epicor software includes several aspects of manufacture. It has helped our company with product manufacture to shipping product.

Cons:

Training is not easy to follow. You may be able to ship product without quality verification. There should be a lock on the functions of the software to follow a procedure fully from components to manufacture, quality control and shipping.

Prophet 21 is a workhorse

Pros:

The Prophet 21 development and support staff are very knowledgeable. Many of the folks have been there a long time, employee retention is great and the knowledge is very useful.

Cons:

some of the import functionality and the inability to add fields to the import mappings

A well known well developed software

Pros:

This software is one that many people have heard of so its easy to refer to and find support online for. It has a wide range of functionality making it a useful product for a massive amount of companies.

Cons:

This product is super expensive. You are paying for the brand, everyone has heard of it. Profit 21 is an incredibly powerful tool but because its made for so many different types of companies there are a lot of functions that you don't need. This makes the interface really busy.

ecommerce catalog

Pros:

Epicor is one of the top catalog providers in terms of automobile parts, even though its quite expensive but they have proven to have the best data in the industry. I've tried a couple others but Epicor hands down has the best catalog system out there to date. They have logged many decades of data pertaining to everything for a vehicle.

Cons:

price! They price is far too expensive, Epicor knows you NEED their catalog to do business via ecommerce. You get assigned a sales guy who's mission is to sell you their cloud service, catalog and other cool features that your business may or may not need. Only utilize the software based on your business needs, tailor make it to fit your budget and work best for your company.

Greatest Software of the century

Comments: I think with the integration, tools and overall capability to handle multiple business needs and the flexibility allows for more efficient business decisions and processes

Pros:

Flexibility

Cons:

Specific Needs Integration

Epicor Prophet 21 is still around and breathing

Pros:

Still functions and can help your company get business done.

Cons:

Outdated and seems a bit de-emphasized by the software manufacturer.

Complicated, slow, and obtuse

Pros:

They're willing to program just about anything for you, as long as you are willing to pay.

Cons:

That you have to customize the software (expensive) to get basic functionality out of it.