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Epicor ERP 10 Integration

Question

We are in the manufacturing industry and we're looking at implementing Epicor 10.1 for our ERP. We want to integrate Epicor ERP 10.1 with WooCommerce as our ecommerce front end. We already have WooCommerce set up on our site and are just using it as a catalog viewer at the moment. We plan on selling our products to end-users as well as to our Distributors.

Do you have a solution for this integration?

Answer

Thank you for your interest in Modern Retail and our WooCommerce Integrator.  We currently have an integration with Epicor Eagle but not Epicor ERP; however, we'd love to have one.  We've actually had several conversations with Epicor about an integration with ERP but have not actually started on it yet.  Are you using the "on premise" version of ERP or their "cloud" version?

May I make a suggestion?  Could you please e-mail your representative at Epicor and let them know they’re interested in getting ERP integrated with your WooCommerce website?  If you copy me on the message, I’ll immediately reply asking to set up a meeting with Epicor.  I'll also get my contact in the Eagle division involved to see if they can help "grease the wheels" over in the ERP group.  I'm sure if we can get our development teams together we'll be able to figure out this integration for you.

We have been doing integrations for over a decade and have more than 1,300 integrations to our credit.  During this time we have amassed a great deal of knowledge and technology, here just a few articles you might find interesting.

I suspect you’re interested in how the integration works from the WooCommerce side, so please read:

You’ll love our WooCommerce Integrator Dashboard, which gives you an overview of the status of your integration.

Please let me know if you need anything else or would like to jump on a call before getting with Epicor.  Thank you.

Reply

We’re in the process of evaluating Epicor. We’re researching a replacement for our current ERP system and so far, this seems to be the best fit. However, their built-in integration is with Magento as an ecommerce front-end. We’ve spent a lot of development time and money on our current site, which is now WooCommerce based and uses as a catalog viewer of our products (1000 total at the moment, with about 700 in WooCommerce, the rest to be added in the next few months). Considering the tremendous cost of migrating to Magento and the higher-cost maintenance and hosting required, we’d like to avoid this scenario. We’re not a high volume retail outlet and I would have trouble justifying the migration costs. We’re a manufacturer in a niche business. We sell to our Distributors, but want to move into full ecommerce transactions selling both to our Distributors and end-users (using our Distributors as the customer’s ship-to and payment point).

For the moment, I appreciate your estimate of the projected costs. This will help in our cost-benefit analysis to help convince management that moving to Magento may not necessarily be the best move. I’ll use the higher end of your cost.

Since you don’t have an Epicor ERP connector at the moment and it sounds like you’d like to have this in your product offerings, are you suggesting that you’d be prepared to share the development costs (since this would  be added to your product offerings for sale)?

We do have a detailed spec for the connector / bridge because last year we were looking at developing a WooCommerce connector to our current ERP system. When it was decided that we were going to get rid of the current system and look for a replacement, that project was shelved, but I still have all the docs.

At the moment we’re in discussions with a local Epicor implementer to ensure that this system is a proper fit. In my own discussions with Epicor, they said they would be prepared to share the details of their API if necessary (I would guess they’re using this API to connect to Magento), to help in determining if a proper connector can be added to meet all of our requirements. Be aware that this migration to Epicor (if that’s the product that’s decided on) probably won’t happen until early next year considering the magnitude of this task and preparing for it.

We also have a few projects that we’re continuing to work on to add additional functionality to our current site that will also need to be integrated with the ERP system. Most of these will need to be tied to the products,  ordering and production systems.

Response

Thank you for the detailed reply.  Yes, we'd love to have an integration with Epicor ERP and yes we'd most likely be using their API.

The estimate I gave you below is the best price I can give you on this integration.  As you can imagine these integrations are time consuming and expensive.  Yes, our ultimate goal would be to create an integration that can be packaged up and sold to other Epicor clients - like what we did Epicor Eagle (their POS system).  Usually it takes several integrations before all the little complexities are worked out with an integration because there's always new things we learn with new customers (e.g because everyone seems to use these systems slightly differently).  Over time the price of our integrations do tend to go down but not until we do a dozen or more integrations.

The good news is you're NOT paying for our integration with WooCommerce - this is already done!  If you read some of the links I sent you yesterday you'll see our WooCommerce Integrator and Integration Middleware is very sophisticated. The estimate below does not include any of the work to get connected to WooCommerce, only Epicor ERP.

Our goal is to build a rock-solid integration that can be resold.  We believe this approach is good for everyone because it allows us to support and constantly enhance the integration with Epicor. 

Let me know if this approach works for you.  Thanks.