Now that we are live with E10.1.400, we are now trying to focus on what to do with our shipping carriers. We currently use World Ship and FedEx, completely disconnected from Epicor. When we first purchased Epicor, we purchased the Insite Manifest modules for domestic and international carriers and have been paying maintenance on them for years. Revisiting things, we see several here are not a fan of what is now called Epicor Manifest and prefer a solution from Agile. We self implemented Epicor so we arenât afraid of getting dirty, but wanted to get a fresh sense of what the community thinks of the two products and is it worth ditching Epicor Manifest in favor of Agile since we are so early in the game. Very eager to hear what everyone has to say.
Go with Epicor Manifest
Agile Ship is pretty awful, in the cases Iâve used it. The integration between it and Epicor is the same or similar to Manifest⌠but the integration between IT and FEDEX / UPS / USPS is awful. Uses macros to basically drive around the interfaceâŚ
One thing Epicor Manifest has going for it is that now Epicor owns it. That might sound like a negative (no more direct phone suppoer), or maybe a shrug, but I think it shows that is the direction Epicor is going to start supporting more heavily going forward.
I admit here freely that shipping is one of the most bug-riddled, error-prone processes we have in Epicor at the moment (ERP 10.0.700.4 / Manifest 3.0.x). Especially the shipments where we need to use Manifest, and most especially the few international shipments we have - although to be fair, part of the struggle there may be a lack of training/experience with international shipping in general. We have been tempted on occasion to get a demo or something of Agile Ship, and are even today meeting to discuss potentially using a 3rd party to handle international parcel shipments.
But I cannot speak to improvements or bug-fixes in Manifest 3.5 - at least not until later this year.
Sorry - this may not be all that useful, you almost need someone with experience with both. Iâd love to hear from that person as well.
Weâve tried both Agile & Manifest. In our needs, Agile worked for us but we typically have a high volume of shipments, some days weâre talking over a thousand packslips in a day. Manifest wasnât able to keep up with our SC workflow but weâre not a typical.
We have been running on Manifest v3 now for 4 days now and it has been a significant problem.
First, there is no longer a high value report. Our shipping department use to use this with the previous version, but it has been removed. Weâre trying to come up with a work around.
Second, the biggest problem we are running into are technical / vague error messages that we donât understand how to resolved.
Examples include:
could not execute batch command
Cannot insert the value NULL into column âCarrierIdâ
Object Reference not set to an instance of an object
a different object with the same identifier value was already associated with the session
We have contacted Manifest and have received partial help. One problem was the country was not set in all of our customers and shiptoâs. We DMTâd the country into the appropriate records and that fixed some of the issues. However, we are still facing similar error messages and we are no longer recieving any more answers from Manifest.
Has anyone ran across these error messages and know of a solution to fix them?
Jeromy, rather than hijack this thread, could you start a new thread and ask those questions? I will pull together some of our internal KB articles and post them somewhere for you. They cover many of your error messages you are seeing there.
This comment may be reflective of AgileShip Connect. As stated in the comment, AgileShip Connect uses the identical web services interface as Epicor Manifest and for that matter the same interface is also used by AgileShip Manifest. So there is no issue with data being sent and received properly for shipping execution.
The comment on the interface between FedEx, UPS and USPS is interesting as AgileShip Connect interfaces directly to FedEx Ship Manager, UPS WorldShip and Stamps.com. This interface has been in place for years with few issues. Some customers even get tech awards from FedEx and UPS for this system and it is doubtful that they would do this if the system had interface problems.
Perhaps the systems were not installed and configured by Agile and therefore the problems mentioned may be due to installation and configuration issues.
We use Insite Manifest and have for years. Itâs been a reliable solution for us. We have integrated with UPS/FedEx/USPS and use international options for each. The integration with carriers is works great. The international forms are automated and simple for our shipping teams (Nafta, Customs Commercial Invoices ect).
You may need to setup international codes on parts. I have seen some users assign each code to thr product groups and automate on new part entry with a BPM.
The system was installed and configured by agile. The issue is the âmacroâ style that agile uses to navigate the UPS and FedEx interface instead of integrating directly.
This causes issues of the user clicks or moves the mouse while the âmacroâ is executing
So @tvonderhaar I will stand corrected on this issue, as @rcs tried to explain there are 2 products and my gripes have been with Agile Ship connect which is the lower end and lower cost solution which attempts to integrate with UPS WorldShip directly, while they (Agile) have a different higher end solution that more directly competes with Epicor Manifest.
So perhaps it may behoove you to give both a try and let me know how it goes.
We have used Insite Manifest for 5 years now and had very little issues. We are just starting testing of 10.1.500 and Epiocor Manifest v3, I can give better updates after our training Monday/Tuesday next week and as we continue on with testing.
Thank you everyone for your input. The good news to me is that both sides have had success with install and use so either will likely to do job for us.
Do you have a programmer on staff? Writing a chunk of code that reads out the shipdetails and creates an XML file for UPS Worldship isnât particularly difficult to do. Then a cheeky update to the ShipHead to write back the, to-long-to-actually-fit, UPS tracking numbers back into E10 (You need to make sure the local user had READ access to the UPS database to retrieve the UPS tracking number)
I donât have much to offer with in house trucks. We do have a special ship via called FCII pickup where we use our companies van. We use it mostly for outside operation POs versus final shipment.
In the cases where we had our âown trucksâ it was actually (for legal & insurance reasons I was told) setup as a separate LLC company. So we set it up as a ShipVia like any other carrier.
Just to add my two cents: Epicor Manifest. Itâs awesome and your people will love you for the day! Of course that could be shortened to an hour depending on the next problem they face and make you the bad guy, LOL!
and let me know how it goes.