Vantaggi
Company has a great positioning within its various markets. The products are hardly 2.0, but serve the most basic needs of our customers, and honestly, the customers aren't typically too hi-tech themselves. If they were R&D focused, they could change the distribution industry for the next 100 years.
Svantaggi
Management is immensely out of touch. Since the merger of Activant and Epicor, there is a huge push to increase revenue, to the point where it impedes the ability of employees to ensure the quality of their product. The entire company has been overtaken by a need to increase revenue from every single bottle-neck that they can put customers into. This doesn't jive well with the customer-base and further, the management of Epicor increasingly tell employees to stop focusing on any kind of activities that do not include billing. So, if a customer is in need, or bugs in the software are found, they're typically ignored as long as possible due to them not being able to make money from that form of transaction. There's a huge push to drive revenue to the point where employees from a few different departments are responsible for billilng 'x' number of hours a day. If you take a vacation, you are still responsible for those hours that you weren't able to bill, and the management will hassle their employees to meet their numbers. This would not be the worst thing if things worked well internally. There are no safety-nets of quality within this company. There is a support group, but many products are hardly supported, and employees are hardly supported to the point where no one will know how to fix certain issues, and as stated, no one will put the time into figuring it out if they cannot bill a customer for it. During the interview process you are promised the world. They tell you that they're a strongly international corporation that empowers its employees with a strong amount of internal classes, and tuition reimbursement, and competitive "bonuses". All this is a quite misleading, the internal classes are customer-focused so they have no way to teach employees in a way that is directed towards the employees. Their method of training is to have employees piggyback on services that the customers are paying for and "through osmosis and observation", learn. Moreover, managers are pressured to train employees for as short of a time as possible, because they don't want resources that aren't billing customers regularly. The problem is that many people are brought in, aren't equitably taught how to perform essential functions, and are then pressured to find as many ways to bill customers as possible. The tuition reimbursement is hardly realized due to people being too busy "billing", the bonuses are a pittance of the amount of hours billed to customers. Salaries are essentially capped after your initial offer, as your raises will be minimal. There is a huge glass ceiling in the organisation unless you are friendly enough with the different managers to be pushed into different roles. With that said, a new role does not necessarily mean a raise, even if your costs triple for that role, or responsibilities triple as well. Lastly, the company does very little R&D, they make small incremental changes to their software over time. New releases of the software are typically solely based off of customizations that their largest customers have paid for, Epicor will then release that customization to the mass-market, as if they had implemented that change themselves. It's written into customer contracts that any customizations made by customers or improvements paid for by them, will remain the property of Epicor to profit off of as they wish. Epicor's main strategy for growth is acquisitions. By acquiring similar, and smaller companies, they have a new rolodex of customers that they sic their sales personnel on. It's a very difficult process for customers to transition to other enterprise solutions that are not owned by Epicor, so the general belief is that once a customer has signed a contract, they have them for life. Largely, this is true. As described above, they then hit up that rolodex of customers for as many billable transactions as possible. Within the company there are almost no metrics used to measure quality of system-use by customers, there are very few things that are cutting-edge about this company. If you are desperate for a job, apply, and try not to stay longer than you have to, there are many many employees here that have been with the company for 10+ years, just stuck because many of these skills are non-transferrable between industries or companies. There has been high turn-over since the merger simply to customers hiring ex-Epicor employees, a lot of employees have also left to work at the competition, Infor.
