All credit to @jdewitt6029 who sent me this article.
New configurator advancements? @timshuwy ?
Has this been an ongoing partnership?
Epicor buys leading CPQ vendor KBMax - (enterprisetimes.co.uk)
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Hmmm, interestingā¦ wonder what the price point will be. Their website says a min of $2500/monthā¦
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KBMax has a great and beautiful product. They already have multiple Epicor customers who they have built integrations for into ERP. Now that KBMax is part of #TeamEpicor, we should see it more tightly integrated into our products, including ERP, ECC, and other products.
So yes, this will allow for some big configurator advancements as we integrate this into our product.
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Iāve worked with a client using KBMax, as a configurator guy I am excited to see where this will take us.
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I wouldnāt be surprised - we built a home-made thing that pieces together lightweight renderings and lets you rotate your package, sort of . It outputs a quote that has to be recreated in Epicor.
I havenāt actually looked at it myself but apparently itās rough, not very ready, cost us about $100kā¦ and brings in several M$/yr. So something thatās well integrated in ERP with a company (or, letās face it, a community) behind it - yup, $2.5k/mo. is a cheap employee.
My biggest concern/question would be related to the degree to which functionality of KBMax overlaps, supersedes, or otherwise replaces the functionality of the existing native product configurator module. The two are not apples-to-apples, but maybe a navel orange and a clementine? Is there room in the fridge for all that citrus? For customers whoāve purchased Epicorās native product configurator module and are about to implement, this must be a question mark. I know it is for my customers. It would be good to know the long term strategy of how these two configurators will play together in the future.
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You can all look forward to hearing some exciting announcements at Epicor Insights 2021. Its only a month away!
The whole thing is a question mark right now with Kineticā¦ If I were evaluating whether to start on a configurator right now I would say donāt (depending on complexity).
Good evening folks. Insights came and went and passed me right byāwere there any directional decisions announced at Insights in regards to the place of KBMax vis-a-vis Epicorās existing configurator module?
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of course there was the standard āno guaranteesā sort of language, but the Epicor folks said there was no intention o removing/crippling the internal CFG in favor of KBMax because the other places the CFG is used (like Inspection plans) still require that functionality.
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There were several things that were clear at Insightsā¦
- KBMax has a great and exciting productā¦ anyone starting off their Configurator Journey should definitely look at the KBMax solution ESPECIALLY if they have a product that can be visually represented, and/or if they have a product that they want their customers to design on the web.
- Epicor is ALSO spending many resources to bring our current configurator up to the Kinetic release, so that configurators can run in the Kinetic environment in a web browser. This effort is still underway, and those efforts have not āstoppedā because of KBMax. It is still a very viable product. If you are currently developing a configurator in the embedded version, now is not the time to stop. I would suggest that you update to the latest version of Kinetic so that you have the latest and greatest features.
The embedded configurator is currently the only totally embedded solution that Epicor Kinetic offers. KBMax still has future development plans to get it embedded into the product, and those roadmaps are still under development.
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