Implement Epicor without AP or AR

Epicor ERP 10
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We have a project on the horizon where the business wants to use epicor for inventory, MRP, job costing, quoting and engineering.
Purchasing and sales will happen in our parent erp and we foresee synchronization of inventor and demand via REST integration.

Any gotchas out there if we don’t implement the AP/AR system interfaces from company config?

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It’s a complicated answer I’m afraid. Epicor’s modules are so intertwined and interdependent that there is very high probability of some configuration items that are in other modules and are necessary for Inventory/MRP to work. I won’t go into detail, but MRP can be dependent on a Part’s lead time from a certain vendor, for example. And Vendors are AP/Purchasing. Inventory has cost-based transactions all over it and a number of things will need to be set up for them to work; and perhaps a series of customizations created to work around some of the automatic behind-the-scenes transactions Epicor does.

Not sure if it’ll work or not, but it’ll be a struggle - I’m fairly confident of that.

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What he said. “Struggle” is probably optimistic.

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I’m a ‘glass is half full’ kind of guy…

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LOL… I’m a consultant. I’ve had customers go live with just Operations and not Finance, or just Finance but not Operations… and in both cases the crossover part is the nightmare. WAYYY too easy for something to not make the jump from one system to another.

Splitting Operations between two systems?

@Eric_Howell we’ll give you all the help we can…

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I’m a “redesign the glass” kind of guy :nerd_face:

I can’t imagine the amount of work it would take to get two systems to talk. Like @Ernie said, there is way too much that could get easily missed. It would take a lot of testing, and would possibly be a nightmare to test on upgrades on either system…

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You never mentioned Financials…

  1. Sales are demands… in order for MRP to know about a demand, it needs to be entered as a form of demand. if the sales order is not in Epicor, then how would epicor know that it is needed?
  2. POs are Supplies… if the PO is not resident inside Epicor, then EPicor will not know that a PO is coming. MRP will try to create a suggested PO.
    SO… MRP without Supply and Demand will cause confusion.

I HAVE seen companies where they segregate the Financials from the Operations. This works well. you can turn off AP/AR/GL interface, and then gather the costing data, receiving data, and shipping data and push it to the other system.

OK, all I really gave you was “problems” but no great solutions… but here are potential options:

  1. you could have your Sales system automatically create FORECASTS that are tied to the customer who needs it. MRP defines a forecast as a demand, and will plan for it. You could have your interface simply regenerate all sales order demands as forecasts every night.
  2. Purchasing Supply orders… this one, I cannot figure out. How can you tell epicor that you have a supply arriving “next week” without a PO inside epicor? You could create “transfer orders”… but there is no practical way of entering the you expect something to arrive outside of a regular supply order (Job, PO, or Transfer order).
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We foresee replicating sales orders in parent erp as $0 sales orders in epicor for make to stock finished goods.
Then we will trigger a qty adjustment in the parent erp when the job is completed and we do a job receipt to inventory transaction (MFG-STK)
We will need to then also close the sales order/line/release in Epicor to remove demand.

We are assuming that there are months and months of supply for components. We understand that MRP will only be able to plan work out as far as our lightest component. This was presented to the business as a risk and was determined by them that it was minimal. When parts are received in the parent erp then there will be a qty adjustment in Epicor with reason code and reference data.

We will still do job costing/inventory valuation/ WIP reconciliation in Epicor

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Why not just use the parent ERP, as an additional site.

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the parent erp is a home grown non-epicor environment

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So to answer your original question about leaving the AR and AP interfaces disabled, that SHOULD not be a problem. All that really means is that your AR and AP transactions (which you will theoretically have none of) will not interface to the GL (meaning they won’t post).

Inventory value will be an area of concern. In Epicor, there is no field for cost in the Inventory Adjustment program. There are several things you can do, but all of them require that the person adjusting the inventory be on the ball and remember to do it every time.

There are a LOT of manual processes you’ll need to develop and maintain… and be prepared for your users to eventually get tired of the duplication of effort. You’re probably beyond the point of being able to change the minds of those who made this decision, so PLEASE let us know how this goes!