Epicor vs Visual Manufacturing

Off Topic
1

Has anyone come from Visual Manufacturing to Epicor that can offer some advice?

We acquired a company that is on Visual Manufacturing and we would like to get them on Kinetic SaaS.

They are reluctant to change and I would like to offer a couple of “you can’t do that in VM” kinds of things.

Any advice appreciated.
DaveO

2

Sorry, I am only generally aware that Visual Mfg exists, vague idea what the interface looks like. I do think this is a very interesting question though.

When I have been involved with several ERP migrations and my reluctance or eagerness usually pretty selfish, relying primarily on what my was role happens to be at the time.
If working in operations…n argument can always be made for “the devil I know”.
When working in IT admin I like uniformity and might lobby outliers to migrate.

But… I am finding it harder all the time compare an contrast systems.
They all seem to be getting pretty good, flexible… just different approaches.

3

Mr. Bruce: Thank you for the thoughts. I agree – it seems hard to compare since they will all get the job done.

I have read a couple of posts that said the Visual Manufacturing support was horrible – however, that was a dated post and not sure it is still true.

DaveO

4

Yeah, I think it will be easy to find “hard feelings” related to quality of support for most systems.
I have a hard time being too critical on a system based on support alone though.
( Even though I do think it’s true that the general quality of support has been steadily going downhill for at least 20 years…for almost all systems).

2 Likes
5

It really depends on what modules that are licensed. Also what version of VM are they coming from? My upgrade experience was from 6.2.8.

6

Mr. Doug: Thank you for the reply.

May i ask what was the biggest thing Epicor offered that VM did not have or VM did poorly?

DaveO

7

Greetings Dave,

I had to chuckle when I read this post. We have acquired any number of companies over the years and I have had to move all of them off of whatever product they were on over to Epicor. Visual Manufacturing is just one of the many :slight_smile:

As far as features are concerned, the prior posts are accurate as it often does depend on licensed features. However, I look at the product age as well. Many of the companies we have acquired had no IT or enterprise software staff. So nearly all of them had very old installations. The last Visual Manufacturing version I worked with was 6.3.8. When they are this old, Epicor brings a lot of modern features. Especially with integration and REST development if that is your thing.

In my opinion ( will fully accept any floggings from the community here lol ), I think Epicor offers the following over Visual:

  • Modern user interface. Even Classic Epicor is better than Visual, but Kinetic is growing on me and will be the future.
  • REST services. We love them, use them all of the time to build beautiful apps that integrate seamlessly with Epicor.
    -Traceability. I can think of any number of areas where Epicor captures the data better than Visual. We are in space flight and have a strict QMS. I need to know who did what, when, and how on just about everything.
    -Project Management. We don’t make coffee pots, instead we make rocket parts and the scope of work required to handle big programs like ours requires something that really looks at things from a much bigger picture. Things like revenue recognition and milestones have been a game-changer for us.

Hopefully this helps. If not, feel free to reach out.

Joshua Patterson
CIO - Doerfer Companies
Former Visual Manufacturing systems admin, twice.

4 Likes
8

Mr. Joshua: Thank you so much for the detailed reply.

You have given us some good ammunition for our meeting this week.

Take Care,

DaveO

1 Like