I’m trying to gather some information on how customers are using Salesforce CRM and Epicor and what an integration might look like.
We have identified some areas of opportunities within our sales process and just at a cursory look, Salesforce looks pretty slick.
Ultimately what we are considering is to move our sales activities (contact and customer account mgmt, communication management, automation of communications) into a different process or system and keeping the back office activities and foundational infrastructure on Epicor.
There would be crossover between data, so I’d imagine there would be a degree of bi-directional integration, however I’d like to limit it of course.
The overarching idea is to have our customer service reps use a product to follow the new “sales pipeline” process and gives them the tools and automations needed to support the process, such as generating e-signature requests for quotes and automatic email communications based on events.
The other path in my mind is a custom web app to handle this, the advantage being there would be no data syncing and the disadvantages being re-inventing the wheel.
I’d really appreciate any dialog about your experience with a Salesforce + Epicor integration or alternatives, if you’ve faced a similar challenge
Looks like basically Epicor uses JitterBit like Service Connect and sells you an ETL and calls it an integration. In that case they can claim they integrate with 100000 different systems, its an ETL - but you have to do the work.
Unless for SF they sell you their workflow and its a install and customize type of thing.
JitterBit was quite expensive compared to Service Connect, Dell Boomi and if I had to pick JitterBit vs MuleSoft since they both are hefty priced I would probably go with MuleSoft.
Or Just .NET Core Microservices and write my integrations in .NET for free.
A big part of this investigation is to determine what gaps we can fill with either a different crm or if we can fix with epicor or a custom interface that utilizes epicor.
As I have looked at with SF, it’s certainly a slick UI and has some very nice automated customer follow ups and other things.
Knowing that almost anything can be done with a custom app, I am trying to balance features, effort, and cost.
I’ve looked at this also, there is Salesforce integration Industry extension that Epicor offer , unsure whether it is still supported though as may have become obsolete with the API tools in 10.2 onwards.
At the time we were on 10.1.400 when exploring this and we would have required Jitterbit to handle the data sync.
Functionally SF was quite impressive and highly customisable, however the business case here did not suit investing in a full CRM package as we predominately wanted to use it for customer email RFQ logging but found it hard to map out any spec.
This may not be accurate, but I am under the impression that Epicor actually use Salesforce themselves.
We have intergrated with SF and Epicor using Jitterbit as an easy way for a sales team to create quotes, customers and contacts which all are bi-directional. Orders, Shipments and Invoices are synced from Epicor to SF. Our sales manager has developed reports for his team that seems to do well and they are activitly reviewing SF reports. There’s some limited information that is only in SF that we do not bring in Epicor releated to CRM activities for customers who are not “official” customers and are not entered into Epicor. It took us a few attempts to get it correct and we are still doing some corrections of old data (occasionally).
Can you speak more to your experience? What made you decide to use SF over the native CRM in Epicor, and how has your company benefited from it? I am concerned over too many entry points for data, i.e. we have a web app for pushing orders to us as well as entering directly into Epicor, and now I’m worried about having a third point of entry.
When you mention tracking CRM activities, are these primarily housed in SF, and how did you go about cleansing the data?
We have an integration between SF and Epicor using SF Apex code. This allows us to call rest APIs to update Epicor customers, quotes and use the rest APIs to call Epicor Baqs containing the data we want to update SF with.
The APex code is easy to maintain and no ongoing integration costs.
I am with Endowance Solutions and we have a strategic partnership with Epicor. Duet360 includes 16 objects out of the box and integrates with E10, Kinetic, P21 and Bistrack. The is a prebuilt platform, with a time to value of a few weeks not months. Epicor is offering Duet360. If you want more information regarding integrating with Salesforce, please contact your CAM for more information.
for free.