We went live with Kinetic this week. I don’t think I am going to be able to deal with the Epicor CRM or lack thereof… I don’t do any email marketing or anything, but the Kinetic email client is a dud.
Salesforce is not an option. Anything else out there worth a look? I know there are a zillion of them. It would need to connect to Epicor.
Erik, they just launched automation studio. I would look to see which CRMs Workato already has connectors for.
I would strongly suggest using Epicor as your source data for CRM and/or sync the two sources.
Workato Apps and Integrations | Workato - Navigate to the Sales and Marketing integrations section there.
We are using HubSpot CRM in our environment and have it integrated with epicor. I know HubSpot has different modules (Hub) you can add and things like that.
@John_Mitchell we have a set of Salesforce.com recipes built and in QA that will become a template within the next few weeks. I believe it is 13 different recipes (Bi-directional Contact sync = 2 recipes, bi-directional Customer sync = 2 recipes, single direction Part update = 1 recipe, etc)… We are also working on a standard template recipe for ADP.
BUT in addition, there are the 500,000 community recipes that can be leveraged. you can download any of those recipes, and swap out Product X for Kinetic. You need to remap the data fields, but the logic is already built in the recipes.
Are recipes API? I am not a developer so pardon my ignorance.
Anything other than Salesforce? I will not use that software.
Think of a “Recipe” as a script that tells the automation what needs to be done. The API is the tool that the Recipe uses to do that activity. But better yet… many applications (such as Kinetic, Salesforce, etc) have “Connectors” that make accessing the APIs much easier. You dont have to know how to do all the special formatting to call the API. The Connector takes a lot of the work out of the recipe building.
To use the “Master Chef” theme… the Recipe is a list of steps that you want to accomplish. The Connector gets you access to the “ingredients” (your data) that you want to process. The API is simply the mechanics to retrieve (or send) the ingredients) via the connector.
In reality, Yes, the API is very important because it is used… but in most cases, you can forget about the fact that there is an API involved.
This product was built for you Erik. Ask Epicor and/or Tim for a demo.
We’re implementing Hubspot CRM, and already have their marketing module. We evaluated SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zoho, and a bunch of others. Managed to make it 5 years on Epicor’s ‘CRM’, with the sales department kicking and screaming for something that has better ability to show all customer communication on one pane…
Andris, that’s awesome you were able to leverage Epicor CRM for so long.
I think it’s great that you started there and as the need for more functionality came you moved to another solution.
I think Epicor CRM has all the basic features of a CRM, but “basic” is contextual. What is considered “basic” at this day and age is more advanced functionality than what was considered “basic” 5-10 years ago.
Ok I am evaluating Hubspot and it looks decent… one thing I don’t like is when you email a quote it doesn’t give you a pdf attachment, it gives you a hyperlink… many of my customers will not be able to click it…
So now looking for another workaround for a workaround lol
I think I am going to go with Zoho CRM… it’s a lot more refined since the last time I used it.
Does anyone know if Workauto will integrate Zoho CRM to Epicor?
I sent you the link to the integrations that workato has, did you see them there?
But don’t mistake the connector for the “recipe” Erik. There is still work to be done to get Epicor to integrate with Zoho.
@timshuwy can speak more on that. It doesn’t just “work” out of the box, you need to build some recipes.
@utaylor you are absolutely correct… seeing a connector does not mean that you buy the connection and you suddenly have an integration.
But what it DOES mean is that you can create a connection into Automation Studio from both Kinetic and Zoho, and then start making the recipes… some of those recipes may take you 15 minutes… some several hours… but you can have the integration built out and tested in a very short period of time.
I just got my hands on a BigCommerce trial account this week, and 15 minutes after getting logged into the account and getting the API key, I had logged into my connection and created my first recipe to move parts from Kinetic to BigCommerce. Anthother 10 minutes later, I had updates from BigCommerce moving back to Kinetic (which is not always wanted… but I wanted to prove that I could). The reason it was easy is not because I am an “Epicor Expert” or a “BigCommerce Expert”… I had never seen BigCommerce before… but it was because Automation Studio is so intuitive, and takes all exposes all the secret sauce to make the integration easy.
I know that this is a late reply, but we are starting our integration with Zoho CRM here soon. Looks like it should be rather straight forward. Has anyone else ran into any issues with Zoho CRM?
How did the integration go?
Wondering if this would be a good choice for our company as well. We are currently moving for Vantage 8 to kinetic and sales department uses Zoho.
