Get Off the ERP Treadmill

Here we go again... Tired of re-investing in your ERP system over and over and over again? Maybe it’s time to get off the treadmill with 3rd-party solutions.

ERP platforms have an inconvenient habit of continually adding and replacing modules, tools, and add-ons. They’ll frequently partner with a 3rd-party solution, then either purchase and integrate them or eventually develop their own in-house solution and end their relations with the 3rd-party. Either way, this leads to a constant need for customers to re-purchase, re-implement, re-train, and adapt to the new solution every few years, which greatly impacts your bottom line and frustrates admins and users alike.

Not singling this out to being just an Epicor issue, but since I know them so well, I’ll pick on them for purposes of illustration. On the reporting side over the past decade, companies have had to learn Crystal Reporting, then SSRS, and now Kinetic which has cost them tens of thousands of dollars in not only re-training their staff and users, but often requires massive costs to uplift their existing reports.

Taking a look at add-ons or expansion modules, Epicor has teamed up with (and continue to do so) a number of 3rd-party solutions which they’ve often discontinued after developing their own in-house offering or through purchase and integration of that offering. (Think EDI, eCommerce, Field Service, Financial Reporting, Hosting, and now a change in Business Analytics just got announced . . . just to name a few)

Again, this all results in major costs for users to purchase and implement the initial solution and then re-purchase, re-implement, and re-train on the updated solution. To make it worse, in some cases the new solution doesn’t exactly offer what the previous one did, so companies are forced to change their processes or be satisfied with reduced functionality.

What we’re seeing as a result of all of this is a major shift towards independent 3rd-party solutions that have no direct ties (and hopefully won’t develop them) to the ERP platform. This used to be blasted by the ERP publishers as a dangerous risk to their application stability. While that may have been true once, the current integration technologies in conjunction with most ERP architectures have come a long way, and we’re not seeing the kind of issues that we were warned about in the past. In fact, it appears to be the opposite. There are actually cases where we’ve seen “internal” modules be more susceptible to version upgrades than integrations to external platforms. Most of these external integrations appear to be version agnostic, and upgrades have little affect on connection and performance.

But the major benefit is that you step off the treadmill. You integrate the solution once, train your people, and you’re set for as long as you decided you want to use the solution. The choice is back in your hands.

So, if you’re tired of re-investing in your ERP system over and over again, it may be time for you to take a look at the multitude of 3rd-party options now available to you. While I can’t speak to all ERPs, I’d be more than happy to share a short list of products with successful Epicor track records that we’ve become acquainted with over the years (you can message me here). Or sign up for our IHS Lunch & Learn series where we will highlight some of these vendors over the coming months, and all the ways they’re helping companies maximize their Epicor investment.