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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Viewpoint Spectrum
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Viewpoint Spectrum is a cloud-based construction ERP suite with project management, accounting, resource management, and reporting and analytics. Key features include workflow automation and collaboration tools, document imaging and sharing, cost estimating tools, and RFI management tools.
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Pricing
Epicor Eclipse
Viewpoint Spectrum
Editions & Modules
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No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Epicor Eclipse
Viewpoint Spectrum
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Prospective buyers may contact vendor directly for a price quote.
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 …
Viewpoint Spectrum allows us to have one platform to do payroll, invoice for projects, and manage the cost of a project. Whereas Procore didn't have those features and we were using multiple other platforms to do all of those things.
Spectrum, when compared to Simply accounting, is better. It has more options, and it is easy to navigate. Spectrum meets our needs better. Spectrum, when compared to Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate, is better. Spectrum has better connectivity between its project …
Not sure how comparable these software are. Both are great and were used for different reasons for different companies and circumstances. I use Viewpoint Spectrum for the Roadway Contruction industry and SAP for the chemical manufacturing world. There are similarities but a lot …
Spectrum is much more comprehensive than its competitors, and provides a much deeper level of insight into project costing. From bidding to project closeout, Spectrum's software allows for cohesiveness and fluidity where other programs are very segmented and difficult to track.
Viewpoint is much more user friendly than Sage 300, but is more limited (less customizable). It is not easy to get custom reports out of Viewpoint, whereas Sage is perfect for customization. With that comes more attention to detail in Sage, from all users, to avoid erroneous …
I originally came off of the American Contractor when it reached its end of life, and my company converted to using Spectrum. American Contractor didn't give us half the visibility that Spectrum does - we still had to rely heavily on outside systems and processes to gain a full …
Prior to acquisition by Viewpoint and then Trimble, the customer support was a major selling point of the software. Unfortunately at this time, that is no longer the case.
Foundation has some nice features that Spectrum doesn't and vice versa. Procore is much more complicated to use but it has better company wide reporting. I think Viewpoint will be a better choice in the long term. They are rolling out updates all the time. The cost is …
Spectrum seems to be a better option for now since current leadership is comfortable with the financial aspect that Spectrum bring but some in the leadership team are not happy with the other offers that Trimble has.
On my old accounting software one feature I miss is the feature where I could run a GL detail report and actually click on a line to see the actual entry.
We selected Viewpoint Spectrum because it allowed us to run our construction and projects department along with our service department all in one application. We are into year five with Viewpoint Spectrum and are still very pleased with our decision.
I have only evaluated the products. I chose Spectrum because it was (at the time) relatively inexpensive or on par with the others and seemed like the best option that fits our business model. It has not proven to be very costly for what we are getting in my opinion and nothing …
I wasn't part of the evaluation, but I did give input on what I thought of Viewpoint Spectrum before we bought it. I had used Timberline and Sage, before we got to Spectrum.
Spectrum is an ERP system that was built with construction in mind. It has more applicability vs. Dynamics, which is used across many types of companies.
I investigated Sage, Timberline, ConMast, and Quickbooks some 25 years ago. Viewpoint Spectrum was the best overall in most coverage and flexibility, ease of use, and mastery. I do not have any knowledge on other software currently.
We stayed with Spectrum for what we thought would be an easy upgrade and transition. However, we are evaluating how we are going to use ViewpointOne Teams because we've suffered many roadblocks to daily use like daily logs and uploading of photos using the app. Also, choosing …
We originally had Jonas Premier prior to Viewpoint based on cost and flexibility (report writing). However, we discovered that Jonas reports are not available as described in the demo. And reports were not easy to read because they had to be created. It was challenging to …
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.
Viewpoint Spectrum would be fine for small to medium-sized companies. It would be great for transitioning from an in-house paper-based process, especially since it's designed with small construction companies in mind. They're making it even easier for smaller companies by offering additional features that you'd normally have to find in other products. However, companies can easily outgrow this system. We have about 15 years of data in the system, over 300 active jobs, and nearly 1,500 employees. In the past 3 years we've noticed slower performance and frequent locks in the system that require intervention from a system administrator. We moved to the cloud about 2 years ago and this has made troubleshooting even more difficult as we don't have the same access that we did before to resolve performance issues.
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.
Subcontract Kiosk can be glitchy - allows subs to overbill on subcontract billing items
Document Imaging can be glitchy - often says users do not have adequate security to view/add documents, but they do - if they sign out and back in, it works fine
At times, support can be lacking - sometimes case responses are delayed or you get an incorrect answer
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.
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.
Some things in Spectrum are NOT that intuitive, but I think knowledge of the software just comes with time. There are still some things I need assistance with in Spectrum but I'm very comfortable with my day to day items now that I've been using it for years. However, if there is something I don't do often or haven't done before, I don't find the software to be that intuitive, I actually find the logic on some things to be a little weird but it's fine once I know how to do it.
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.
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.
For the most part the product is very reliable. Since we are hosted we sometimes have connectivity issues but I would say that is more our ISP than Spectrum.
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.
The support has recently changed. Last year, you could call in and get an immediate response. Now that doesn't seem possible unless you have an urgent situation with access to the software, payroll or payables. I have found that using chat or e-mail works nicely for the most part, but sometimes I feel it would be easier if someone from support would jump on our site and take a first-hand look rather than going back and forth
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.
Our trainer was excellent and navigated the time zone differences expertly. She gave us test assignments to complete and was available for questions at any time.
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.
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.
Spectrum, when compared to Simply accounting, is better. It has more options, and it is easy to navigate. Spectrum meets our needs better. Spectrum, when compared to Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate, is better. Spectrum has better connectivity between its project management system compared to Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate. Spectrum, when compared to CMIC, I believe they are equal. CMiC has a better project management system, but Spectrum has an easier accounting system to navigate.
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.
You can grant user specific access which is nice. Project managers do not need all the same modules as Accounting. But Accounting does need access to PM modules as well
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.
Viewpoint Spectrum has allowed us the opportunity to be proactive in analyzing the costs for a project in time to make a difference in the outcome of the project. It has allowed us defense in supporting our communications with the project owners.
Viewpoint Spectrum has allowed us to become more productive with its accounting software and the cohesion between the modules. It has definitely streamlined the processing necessary to account for the business.
