Epicor Eclipse vs. NetSuite ERP

For medium (with growing pains!) organizations, Epicor's Eclipse software would be a great distribution and point of sale software solution and competes well with other software solutions out there. For large distributors Epicor's custom programming has the ability to tailor their software to customers exact need. I feel the cost of the system would be prohibitive to smaller distributors.

Incentivized

NetSuite suits a mid-sized company best where the organization uses multiple currencies in its day-to-day transactions. NetSuite is ready-to-use for businesses that follow financial standards. The more custom business processes there are, the more implementation is required. I would not recommend NetSuite to a large organization due to its performance issues. Additionally, the in-house bank reconciliation tool is not user-friendly for business purposes.

Incentivized

• Great for retail sales and it works well with ipads, scanners, credit card machines and was easy to implement.
• Initial support, setting up Eclipse and ensuring that everything works correctly was a huge benefit. We were off running from the start.
• Epicor has continuing education on its products and offers alternatives for things they cant do.

Incentivized

• Customizable Reports and Saved Searches allow much more maneuverability
• Elimination Entries that are driven by advanced intercompany journal entries
• Journal Entries can be entered in as basic or advanced intercompany to better represent the type of transaction occurred for reporting purposes
• Training through the LCS module can help shed knowledge on a range of topics at a self paced learning basis
• NetSuite ERP offers to all users a SuiteAnswers platform to pose frequently asked questions with answers generated from a combination of NetSuite ERP experts, users, and more recently AI based.

Incentivized

• Their support has gotten worse over the years. They fired a large portion of staff in favor of cheaper new hires. It is getting slowly better over time as their support people are gaining experience, but decades of institutional knowledge was lost. Response time can vary wildly depending, which is troubling when you have an immediate need. They have made a partial mea culpa, but the situation is not fully remedied.
• The user interface is clunky. The original interface, E-term, is a terminal based system (think DOS). A few years ago they rebuilt it using Java and called the new interface Solar, which is a more point and click, windows friendly version. Solar is slower, and so has been difficult for us to get the user adoption we've needed. In addition, any customization we do doesn't work in Solar. Now they have announced a new road-map to make it all web-based. Good luck to them, but it seems they spend all their time playing catch-up instead of making deep system improvements.
• There are significant gaps in what Eclipse is able to do. Sometimes there are third party products (Proof of Delivery, E-commerce, Tax, etc.), and sometimes Epicor offers in house solutions (Job Management, EDI, etc.). In either case, there are a string of products we have to integrate and maintain to make Eclipse functional. Most of them require support contracts, and have varying degrees of support.

Incentivized

• Some of the customization options are really complex and can be difficult to figure out without NetSuite ERP direct support.
• The usability is a bit less intuitive than Quickbooks.
• The cost to give someone a license to even just view information in NetSuite ERP is pretty high.

Incentivized

I use it every day and can't see a reason why I would stop unless I started a new job. If I were to leave my present position, the new job would be much more attractive if they were Eclipse users.

Incentivized

I am not the decision maker for this but I believe our company will be sticking with NetSuite for the long term. A CRM like this is a big investment and not something you move away from quickly and without a lot of planning. There is a lot of data involved and importing that into a new system is no easy task.

This is very easy to use for someone that hasn't ever used the system before. Despite any preconceived notions about how a system should function they can learn this and become efficient with really not a lot of effort. I have used many systems and this is probably one of the easiest I have ever had to learn to navigate and use.

Incentivized

It's beneficial if you know what you're doing, but it can be very confusing to find what you're looking for, and many things seem overly complicated or require too many steps to accomplish a simple task - which can be overwhelming for someone accustomed to QuickBooks.

Incentivized

I haven't experienced any outages in the two years I have been using the system. It is always available as long as the computer is up. The only time I have seen it not be available was on occasions where we lost internet, or power and then we lost access to everything, not just Epicor Eclipse.

Incentivized

It has been very reliable. I can only think of 1-2 times in 4.5 years that we have had issues getting in, and in each case were able to get back in within 1 hour. There has not been a major downtime

Everything in this system moves fairly quickly, that may be in part because we are a small company with only 21 users on the system at a time, or it may just be a the way the Epicor Eclipse works for any size company with any number of users. I can only speak for what I know and say that it is fast for our purposes.

Incentivized

Most of the time the performance is very good. Pages load in a few seconds; financial reports take less than 5 seconds; basic searches take a few seconds. But performance can be sporadic throughout the day and cause the run time to triple.

Incentivized

The tier 1 support is trying, and sometimes they are successful. Sometimes they aren't. This topic isn't as black and white as the questions might suggest. Currently their Tier 1 support team is over seas, all items automatically go to Tier 1 and then when they can't help they either escalate it or tell me they need to check with someone else and they will get back to me. If they escalate me to Tier 2, then the issue comes back to the States and the support is usually at a higher knowledge/experience level and it can get resolved fairly quickly. If they don't escalate, then it might take weeks and multiple follow ups on my part before I either get a satisfactory resolution or finally get escalated.

Incentivized

I would like to give 8 rating for NetSuite support and reason for that is below: Whenever we faced any technical or functional issues we tried to reach out to NEtSuite support but response was not immediate. We told them about the urgency of the issue but still we were not getting response on time. Then, we have to reach out to AE to get things resolved.

Incentivized

The training classes that I have attended have been top notch. The presenters are extremely knowledgeable on their subject matter, including real-world application of the system. They aren't just software techs training end users, they seem to be end users that have become experts in the over functionality and capabilities of the system.

Incentivized

I had in person training for a day when first got the software. The training was good. The challenge was that there was a large gap between training and when we went live so we forgot quite a lot

The on-line training is very good, and it is taught by the same people that do the live in-person training sessions. The difficult part of it is, asking questions about your specific company's nuances or special circumstances. I don't remember if you can access the on-line training sessions after you have taken them for reminders purposes, but if so that is a great asset.

Incentivized

Online training is quite strong. I have used for specific pieces of functionality.However it is not sufficient in all areas.

I don't really know about the implementation, it was back in 1998 and I didn't start here until 2016. By the time I started here they had been running it for a number of years and most of the people that were here when it was implemented are no longer here, and the ones that are don't really have much to say about how the implementation went either bad or good.

Incentivized

Implementation was fine but could have gone quicker.

NetSuite provided me a implementation guide who I did not think was very knowledgeable.

I recommend that you make sure the organization knows how they are going to use the software and come up with an implementation plan before importing all of the data.

Most of my experience has been with Epicor's Prophet 21. For most distribution verticals, Prophet 21 is the only way to go. The comparison I've drawn is this: Prophet 21 is like a ferrari. Epicor Eclipse is like a reliable donkey. Both get you from point A to point B but Prophet 21 is going to get you there much quicker and with the kind of insight into your business that will help you thrive.

Incentivized

NetSuite by far is the most expensive; However, compared to the 3 systems notated, the overall functionality, capability and reporting advantages make it my top choice for companies experiencing exponential growth across all departments. Its a best in class solution for just about any user.

Incentivized

I don't really know about the scalability. It's the same as it was when I started, I do know that you can buy more user licenses, but I think they come in packs of 5, which can be a problem if you only need 1 and will never use the other 4. But, again I'm not sure on that.

Incentivized

We have been able to scale our business 25X without any major overhaul with Netsuite. Its dashboard setup makes onboarding new employees very easy and allows data to be shared across multiple offices. Its cloud setup does not put any pressure on IT to scale servers or other infrastructure. We have been able to become much more efficient in all aspects of the business.

• Reporting features allow tracking items trending downward which can glut inventory space and dollars if not adjusted
• GMROI reports help analyze turn ratios and adjusted dollar values and margins of product lines.
• Suggested Purchase Order features allowed controlled inventory purchases which avoid lost sales while managing overall dollars invested in an acquired product with the lowest freight costs possible.

Incentivized

• NetSuite ERP data is used for material reporting. That is like balance sheet and profit and loss reporting. It plays a key role in financial data management.
• Too many customisation become hard to manage in over a period of time.
• High cost licensing.

Incentivized