Epicor Software is headquartered in Austin, Texas, U.S., and has offices in most regions of the world. Epicor is owned by KKR, a global investment firm. Several years ago, Epicor began to rearchitect its product to enable public cloud deployment. Epicor provides a range of business applications for manufacturing, distribution, retail and services organizations. The solution evaluated in this Magic Quadrant is Epicor ERP, which is aimed at midsize organizations across a wide range of industries, but with most adoption being by manufacturing and project-centric organizations. The markets for Epicor products are strong in North America, U.K., and Australia, as well as other markets in EMEA and APAC. Epicor ERP is sold and implemented both directly and through partners.
Epicor ERP, first released in 2008, was designed for deployment on-premises and in private and public clouds. Initially, the public cloud offering was limited to specific industries and markets, but this limitation has relaxed in recent years, and availability was further extended in January 2018. At the time of evaluation, Epicor ERP was on version 10. Epicor ERP has a reputation for being a flexible and highly capable product for small and midsize manufacturing companies (those with employee numbers ranging from 20 to more than 1,000).
Epicor is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. It has a strong focus on cloud and midsize organizations, and a good vision for, and understanding of, cloud ERP. Overall, surveyed reference customers scored Epicor’s support and services as above average, but below those provided by the Leaders in this Magic Quadrant.
Strengths
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Epicor has solid operational ERP functionality for midsize organizations. Its partnership with Microsoft on the Azure platform will enable it to deliver better capabilities for analytics and mobility, and to expand its popular training-on-demand offerings.
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With a wide range of country localizations and languages, Epicor ERP can support global operations. Compared with the vendors in this Magic Quadrant that focus more on small and midsize businesses (SMBs), Epicor has more comprehensive localization capabilities and does not rely on partners to localize its product.
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Surveyed reference customers praised the flexibility of Epicor ERP. They like the ease with which the solution can be configured to meet their workflow and process needs.
Cautions
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Surveyed reference customers gave Epicor an average score for overall customer satisfaction, relative to other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. However, most Epicor ERP functionality uses a client user interface that lags behind the usability of some competitors’ offerings, appearing as something of a “legacy” client/server interface. On the plus side, in May 2018, Epicor announced the new Epicor Kinetic Design Framework, designed to provide the optimal user experience for each user role. Also, in its most recent release, Epicor introduced a completely redesigned Epicor ERP Active Home Page and new apps for mobile devices.
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Despite Epicor’s strengthened focus on the quality of product delivery, the availability of skilled implementation resources does not completely satisfy demand. This applies especially to customers outside North America who want to upgrade from older versions of Epicor ERP.
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Some reference customers identified performance and support issues with the Epicor ERP cloud service. Epicor has invested to improve its performance and support — by, for example, introducing the EpicCare global support initiative — but it still lags behind the leader in these areas.