Epicor Eclipse is an end-to-end business system for wholesale distributors, as well as electrical, HVAC, plumbing and PVF businesses. Eclipse simplifies complex distribution processes found in today’s dynamic supply chains.
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Oracle E-Business Suite
Score 7.6 out of 10
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Oracle E-Business Suite is a comprehensive suite of integrated, global business applications. The suite includes cross-industry capabilities spanning ERP, CRM and supply chain planning.
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 …
There aren't any better industry specific ones, but I have looked at Dynamics 365, SAP, Odoo, and others to see if a more robust, configurable, ERP could be customized to suit our industry. Not yet, but the balance is tipping away from Eclipse.
The first company that I worked for in the wholesale industry had an in house ERP. This ERP, I thought at the time was really great. When I started using e-term, I realized that my first experience of an ERP was not as strong as it could have been.
Since we have been on Eclipse for 13 years, our only comparison to other business systems is when training new employees and ask those new users their opinions during training. In general, nearly all new users of Solar Eclipse are impressed by the ease of use, ease of …
Epicor Eclipse was here when I started 2 years ago. SAP and Great Plains were used at previous employers. Epicor Eclipse versus the others, I would say that Eclipse has the edge in terms of the learning curve for new employees because of how easy it is to use. However, it is …
I Have not tried other products, I've been an Oracle consultant for a long time, first, an oracle developer, using forms and reports, later, programming Oracle EBusiness Suite Extensions, and an Oracle Consultant for EBusiness Suite and ERP Cloud.
I have not used SAP ERP apart from building automations for it, which were much harder to do so due to automations being classed as scripting which is an expensive extra. This is in contrast with most Oracle tools where UiPath is a licensed partner, which enabled quick and easy …
Oracle eBusiness Suite is an early generation ERP system that we decided to use years ago when the cloud was not even available. EBS was evaluated then against other ERP systems. Over the years, EBS has delivered some value to our business operations.
Oracle e-business suite is better than any other ERP because it is more user-friendly and can be operated by anyone even those who don't know how to run it. Also it has better APS, allowing you to better track costs and allocate resources more efficiently. Also, it has better …
Oracle eBusiness Suite has lots of flexibility in terms of customization and also it has modular approach which makes it each to modify as per their needs.
Oracle eBusiness Suite provides improved financial
management and reporting reliability and ties in GRC requirements.
Oracle prides itself on risk management solutions that help to enforce
Oracle EBS works great on top of the Oracle Database, we selected Oracle EBS as our institutional solution because it really is an integrated solution in which payroll, accounting, fixed assets, and time and labor can interact with each other to deliver the kind of solution …
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.
Oracle Cash and Treasury Management fill the gaps in treasury management with features that are very helpful in building the modern financial system that we so desperately need. It may not be the most intuitive tool on the treasury market, but with a little more practice time, important expense analysis can be achieved. I am confident in this treasury tool for this year 2022 and I would like to recommend it to other companies so that they can also have a better administration.
The EBS Oracle Order Management and Shipping Execution solution allows the creation of an integrated, seamless order-to-cash process and accurately capture of customer orders across multiple channels.
Orchestration of order details for seamless fulfillment execution.
Efficient shipment planning and confirmation.
Communication of order status information to customers throughout the order lifecycle.
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.
Because the application is working globally, it sometimes hangs and the connection is dropped.
It should have more shortcuts to make it easier to develop macros. I create many macros and use the "sendkeys" command in VBA, due to the lack of these shortcuts, it is not possible to automate the process.
For now I can not think of other areas that require improvement.
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.
After almost 5 years, we have a full control of this ERP System. We are able to implement new functionalities and modules without any major "consulting" expenses. As of today we are making almost 90% of the personalization/customization and implementation all in house. Once [it] is tuned, [it] keeps running very well with no major issues.
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.
The various forms - like order entry forms that allow the uses to enter sales orders and the ability to personalize the views based on end user needs - are easy to use and follow standard business processes. The new release has a big focus on usability and forms now have a familiar web look and feel which has increased usability considerably.
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.
Because of the transactional nature of the system this software is available 24 X 7, and IT is responsible for making sure the system is available during normal business hours.
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.
The performance of the product is very good. Given the transactional nature of the system one of the key focus areas for IT is to make sure performance is not affected for internal reasons. This can also depend on the server configuration and setup. For example, performance on Exadata machine is far superior to other Linux custom systems that companies choose to deploy. In general though, as already pointed out, the platform is now very stable and has few bugs. Whenever there are any issues, the cause is usually customizations that we have made to the platform, rather than out-of-the-box standard functionality.
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.
In general, support has not been great - particularly standard (non premium) support . The main issue is that our IT staff has been using this platform for years and is very knowledgeable Whenever something goes wrong, we usually have a very precise idea of what the problem is. We are skilled at problem diagnosis. But the Oracle support process is very rigid and slow. Typically, we are required to go through a lengthy diagnosis process where they ask us multiple questions sometimes over several days and we are obliged to talk to different people with differing levels of knowledge. Since we already know what the problem is, we really just want a patch or a bug fix, but it takes days to get there instead of minutes. This can be very frustrating. This is a big part of the reason why we pay for premium support. But it's still a bit disappointing.
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.
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.
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.
The key success factors for the implementation was project management, in-house expertise in IT and time. The implementation process started with the initial evaluation with the initial upgrade on a test system and mapping out the gaps and requirements. We did work with Oracle to understand the new functionality R12 had to offer and did another upgrade and researched solutions. With the use of software development cycle procedures there were conference room pilots with IT, business users. We then refined the project plan to the core key details, performed mock go-live implementations and finally upgraded the software. Overall, this was a very successful process.
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.
Without knowing what product you have now I can not tell you the stack up. I don't want to tell you that this is better than what you have as I have not seen your setup. What I can tell you is that you can't go wrong with the Oracle name. It's a worldwide name and that alone should be taken into consideration. However, talk to your sales reps. Get all the information. Pay an independent Contractor to evaluate what it's truly going to take before going down this road.
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.
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.
We recently implemented Supplier Portal and Invoice Imaging Solution. This has reduced manual effort and increased speed and accuracy. There is no need for people to key in invoices manually now. Suppliers can flip a purchase order into invoice and Oracle will do all the validations and put the invoice on hold in case of any discrepancy.
Suppliers are very happy with the supplier portal as they can track the entire lifecycle of the invoice online.
With automation, we could bill all our customers on time. Oracle collects all the possible costs like payroll and expenses, adds markup, and bills our customers. We could track profitability and margins by project.
The period close and reporting has become easier and faster with this software. 3 people can close the periods now as opposed to 10 before.
