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Epicor HCM (discontinued)

Score9.6 out of 10

20 Reviews and Ratings

What is Epicor HCM (discontinued)?

Epicor HCM supplied human resource management system (HRMS) capabilities, but Epicor has stopped offering this functionality and company's HR applications are no longer available.

Categories & Use Cases

Top Performing Features

  • Employee demographic data

    Administrators have the ability to enter detailed demographic data for each employee.

    Category average: 8.1

  • Employment history

    Employment history is the ability to track previous positions held.

    Category average: 8

  • Job profiles and administration

    Job profiles and descriptions can be created and edited.

    Category average: 7.9

Areas for Improvement

  • Ability to combine HR data with external data

    Ability to bring data from external systems like CRM and combine with HR data.

    Category average: 6.5

  • Review reminders

    System can generate reminders to ensure review completion timeliness.

    Category average: 7.5

  • Pre-built reports

    Pre-built reports is the provision of a variety of canned reports on employee retention, and other key metrics.

    Category average: 7.3

Happy employee, happy corporation! Made possible through the services that Epicor HCM has to offer!

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Epicor HCM solutions to enable an efficient employee experience and to increase productivity and performance. With this modern tool, we can reach employees in real-time and anywhere, and we can empower them to self-serve with OOB HR assistance. This also allows our users to set & manage their own goals, as well as to measure their achievements and improve satisfaction.

Pros

  • Allows our users to set and manage personal & career goals, and track their progress.
  • It improves efficiencies, productivity, and overall satisfaction of our employees, which ultimately drives better quality work.
  • This tool helped improve our ROI by utilizing best-practice programs to identify and match qualified talent with the company's ultimate goals.

Cons

  • Their support team can be challenging with delayed response time.
  • The front-end user presentation could use some updates; The visuals seem old and outdated.
  • The reporting doesn't cover some of the OOB requirements, so most of the time, the team members will need to be pulled in and develop custom queries to fit our needs.

Return on Investment

  • Epicor HCM had a positive impact on our ROI by matching the right employees to specific roles based on their set of skills and competencies.
  • The tool positively impacted the performance and efficiencies throughout the different corporate departments.
  • It could have a negative impact on user satisfaction when it comes to support and response time.

Alternatives Considered

Paycor and ERPNext

Other Software Used

Epicor CMS, Oracle Access Management, 3Cloud

Epicor HCM - Preferred HR System for the Database Guru

Pros

  • The database relational structure and schema. Spending several years as a database engineer, I appreciate the normalized design of the underlying database structure. I feel that when compared with many other information systems, Epicor HCM is a model that I frequently reference to other people as an example of a "properly built" database schema.
  • The out of the box customization tools. Although they do not always work as well as intended, HCM is a product that understands that every business runs a little differently. The ability to rename fields and manipulate variables using tasks in the front-end interface does allow for some easier tailoring of the out of the box processes to terms that our business users were familiar with (resource editor, global variable editor). The task editor also provides good promise to be a tool to customize the interface to see what you want to see on the form. However, this is somewhat limited in potential and is subject to frequent bugs as of 5.8. Customization of menu items and menu tabs on the main menu is possible, which is a perk, but can be a bit confusing when compared to other systems. Some bugs required manipulation through the database in order to get them to fall into place properly.
  • The ease of use. Once properly oriented with the product, adept computer users should have no problem navigating through the main page and flowing through the steps to complete maintenance on records or enter personnel actions, etc.
  • Configurability. Because of the database structure, code tables and data tables allowed us to enter data that matches our business model and properly maintain the personnel information in the way we found suited us best.

Cons

  • Limitations of ad hoc query potential. The visual builder should have an option to "go advanced" and allow more complex queries to be written. The SQL-entry does not allow more than basic subqueries and joins. Compound queries, which are used by salary grade information, are not supported through this interface. All reports are run through SSRS, which is fine to be embedded on the screen, but I felt that the transition from query information from user's superview to some viewable information has some room for improvement.
  • End-user experience with record manipulation user interface flow / structure. I understand what developers were going from with the one screen record selection on the left navigation panel with record data on the right side. This sounds good in theory and works well with technically-savvy users. However, I found that with less technically oriented users, the visual flow of this was not as intuitive and accepted by the users (including candidates of the company), frequently making mistakes and being unable to complete required tasks. Because this interface is prevalent throughout the system, I would recommend focus-group testing redesigned versions of the interface with general information to see which redesign potential, or even just visual styling to the existing interface, could be cascaded through the software.
  • Out of the box reporting and configuration. This is something that is difficult to nail down in a software because every customer is different and will use the system a bit differently. However, I felt that the standard product comes with tons of reports enabled on the menu, but most are of little value if not first edited. This needs to be done by exporting, manipulating using report developer tools, and re-imported. This is not unexpected, but I think that it would add value for HCM to provide a tool which assists in the configuration of the reports.
  • Security flaws or limitations of functionality. In an organization where some HR users should have access to see some or most users' information, there is not this security also embedded on important features like "routing history" or "audit" tasks. For example, if the enterprise president receives a bonus, an HR manager who must field weekly audits in a branch location will have access to see that bonus if they are granted access to the routing history or audit tasks.

Return on Investment

  • Epicor HCM overall has had a strong positive affect on the speed at which HR actions are completed and improves the quality of the data being maintained. Routing actions for approvals and electronic notifications, which are new features above our previous electronic system are harder to lose than paper.
  • Epicor HCM professional services experience has been hit and miss, but all in all, mostly negative. Throughout our implementation, Epicor has had a few personnel assigned and reassigned to our project. Our problems frequently needed to be escalated, and disturbing periods were communication was not available by key Epicor project members led to a disheartening experience. A lot of configuration by professional services experts and consultants of Epicor needed to be completely redone, leading to incorrect payouts for benefit deductions and costing the company significant loses that could not be refunded without legal action. These were not pursued, but the diligence and expertise with which these services were carried out were very disappointing.

Usability

Epicor HCM, not for customer support

Pros

  • Lots of room for configuration
  • The system is flexible and can be configured as needed
  • Have nice reporting capability

Cons

  • Epicor customer support is absolutely terrible. Unable to respect their committed delivery date.
  • The overall interface is very dated and not intuitive.
  • Alerts are limited

Return on Investment

  • In terms of ROI, we can say that Epicor HCM is meeting the needs but is really not perfect.

Epicor HCM for mid-sized businesses

Pros

  • Highly configurable to meet needs of nearly any company
  • Easy to use interface, with alerts and approval routing for common tasks
  • Comes with pre-built reporting model which facilitates generation of custom reports
  • Ability to interface with 3rd party software, such as organization charting and payroll
  • Web-based so no client side software to install
  • Has pre-built Employee and Manager self-service features

Cons

  • I would like to see better quality of first line support staff. Many times they are not able to answer questions about the product and escallation is required to find a person with knowledge to resolve problems.
  • Upgrades rarely go smoothly. Usually we find bugs and have to get patched versions before we can upgrade our live system.
  • Standard reports do not cover most requirements so custom report development is usually needed.

Return on Investment

  • We have been able to reduce our HR administration overhead by extending the software with interfaces and automated alerts/routing.
  • Our employees are using the employee self service portal to update their personal information and answer questions without the need to contact HR.
  • Managers are able to find information about their employees without HR involvement
  • Custom reports have reduced the need to maintain information in off-line Excel files

All employee related information in one master file

Pros

  • Security is always an issue with payroll/HR software. Security in Epicor HCM is very robust. In our manufacturing facility it is important that supervisors have access to their employee's information and the software allows me to limit access to only the correct department. There is also menu security that will allow me to remove access to features by user and grant access only to what they require to do the job.
  • This software is the repository for many different types of employee information. For example in the past we have tracked skills training by employee in either an Access database or an Excel spreadsheet. We are currently in the process of loading individual employee skill information which will allow us to query the database to pull any information that is not already a canned report in the system.
  • Payroll tax reports are handled by the system seamlessly. In our old system I had to keep confidential employees in a different "company" which meant I had to combine the two companies and do quarterly and year end tax reporting manually. The confidential flag in Epicor HCM allows me to utilize reports directly from the system and also creates the files needed to file online for both my quarterly SUI and W-2 reporting to SSA at year end.

Cons

  • Epicor HCM has both query and report writing functionality. The quantity of information contained in the database is enormous and can sometimes make it difficult to locate the correct fields for writing custom reports. Within the Vantage product there is a data dictionary which displays each table and the information contained therein. It would be very helpful if it also covered the fields within the tables in Open4.

Return on Investment

  • Our HR department is more efficient and therefore we are able to provide better customer service to department supervisors by having answers to employee related questions in one employee master file rather than having to search through paper files or look in different spreadsheets.
  • We are able to provide more accurate payroll processing and if we do find that someone forgot to report PTO for one of their employees the system allows a manual check to be cut so the employee can be paid the correct amount in the proper week thereby increasing employee satisfaction.