Executive Summary

• This article is part of our honest vendor series, which is one of the only ratings of vendors rather than applications.
• The vendor quality is critical to the decision making process as software purchases have a high long term involvement by the software vendor.

Introduction

Epicor has far too many lawsuits for a company of its size. Epicor should be the smaller and more value-focused software vendor when compared to SAP and Oracle. However, Epicor – at 4,500 employees is not that small. Secondly, the charges, which have surfaced from an analysis of many lawsuits, indicate that Epicor behaves as a “mini-Oracle.” A number of the lawsuits show very weak application flexibility combined with significant limitations in customization.

Epicor continues to grow through acquisition, but this is continuing to lead to low quality and short-term growth, using the acquired companies to sell more Epicor products – following a “buying customer” rather than strategic acquisition policy.

Value

The information quality provided by Epicor is of poor quality. Like SAP and Oracle, Epicor’s sales routinely get themselves into customers for whom they do not have the functionality to meet their customer’s needs. This means that Epicor is following a low-quality sales model of telling prospects that functionality is in Epicor ERP that isn’t. Clients that have dealt with Epicor even go so far as to recommend that clients take down precisely what Epicor representatives say because the story will often change in the future. If you need a court stenographer in your dealings with a software vendor, you may want to think twice about buying from this vendor. It is a constant issue with Epicor is that they oversell what the software can do, and end up in cost overruns. Court cases against Epicor indicate both overselling, and then after the sale is made further misinformation which is used to cover up the real reasons that a customer is not able to get the software to work in a particular way. This is most likely because consulting is very subordinate in the organization to sales, and that sales are pressuring consulting to cover for them. Many of these cost overruns are not the result of typical overruns due to changing requirements but are the result of misinformation given out during the sales process.

We have analyzed Epicor’s marketing documentation, and it contains quite a few falsehoods, and unlike better software vendors is not focused on educating the customer/prospect. Much of the information – which centres around “embedded solutions,” is nothing more than marketing hyperbole. And in fact, the way Epicor’s software works has little to do with the concept’s presented in Epicor’s sales documentation. We considered giving Epicor our lowest rating. However, they do not produce the enormous quantity of false information that SAP, Oracle, and IBM do, (of course Epicor is a much smaller company) still we have given them the next lowest grade.

Consulting and Support

We rate Epicor consulting as average. However, support has slipped as of the Activant merger – with buyers we speak with questioning how much support at Epicor is a priority versus selling more software.

Internal Efficiency

Epicor, due to fairness issues in terms of compensation (too much compensation going to the top and too little for those that will be working on your account) has a problem with employee morale. And this negatively affects both the motivation of implementation consultants and support personnel.

Innovation

Epicor is a moderate innovator.

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