Software & Vendor Selection: Where to Look

by EstesCloud | Jun 7, 2021 | Business Direction, ERP Consulting, ERP Selection, Software

The Best ERP Software Begins with the Best People

At every step, from software selection to ERP implementation, people are always your best resource.

Back-feed your software & vendor selection script with experiential feedback.

Now that the internal part of the work is done, you can start contacting people outside of your business to help with your software & vendor selection process. Before you call any vendors or developers, there is another step. Peer and expert help is a good idea, especially when considering new enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.

Where to look for feedback and ideas

Advice from industry peers and other groups will help you understand your software application options. Cloud-based ERP education is easy to come by, but it is important to have a trusted person explain the fine print. ERP solutions are often sold in a pure SaaS (Software as a Service) deployment, and this might not be the perfect fit for your business. You might be a small business looking for your first ERP software solution, or you might be a complex manufacturing company looking for the real-time flexibility of a cloud hosted ERP system.

We all have friends from previous jobs and alumni groups that we can lean on when making big business decisions. The internet is full of advice and much of it is useful. Chase answers, seek multiple views, and engage in a business process review if you’d like an assessment of where you’re at before adding anything new to the mix. An ERP vendor will give you one perspective, and those near and dear to your internal business processes might have different opinions.

Keep your search organized

Develop a questionnaire. This will help keep the members of your team unified when they begin gathering information. The questionnaire also keeps the questions useful. For example, the question “Did you like the software?” is not a very powerful question. Instead, use questions such as, “What was the primary requirement you wanted to satisfy?” Then you might follow up with a related question like, “In what specific ways did the software satisfy that requirement?” The final value of your questionnaire is that you will be able to compare and relate responses from a variety of sources to each other. You will also be able to develop a value scale that can allow you to have an objective scale to compare the responses and their value to your business.

Talk to people

When trying to choose ERP software, it is helpful to contact people from industry and trade groups. These will often be businesses that are similar to yours and their input can be useful in helping you make your decision. Use a little caution and avoid sharing where your next growth is expected and understand these businesses will be wary of sharing anything that might allow you to become a better competitor.

Your CPA and other resources that you have can benefit you as well when selecting software. Other clients that your CPA has might have been through a software search of their own. At this stage, you are not ready to take action yet and your CPA probably is ready and willing to act as a consultant helping in your search for a fee.

Use the internet for software & vendor selection research

The internet can provide examples of other businesses who have experience with software selection. Often you can find these businesses on the fifth page of your Google search and once you find them, even a quick phone call will frequently yield a person who directly participated in their selection and software implementation and has useful experiences to share. Many people are more than willing to help if you ask them.

Now take action

Once you have done your research, you might first decide to re-evaluate your requirement list. You might find some listed requirements to be of less value than originally considered or have found a point from one of your sources that should be added to your requirement list. Through this research, you probably learned of a software provider, previously unknown to you, that was highly recommended. You certainly learned new ways that others found that helped in their search or even helped their business operations after their implementation. You also learned of search actions others would have done differently if there were an opportunity to make their search again.

Now you can develop a list of only a few software providers or brands that likely will be beneficial to you. An internet search might list a thousand systems, which are too many to evaluate. Focus on your short list and begin contacting those few. The goods or services you offer will greatly benefit from new solution, whether you’re adding a third-party business intelligence platform or a new accounting software to your resource pool.

Remember that people are your best resources for ERP and more

Mid-sized manufacturing and distribution companies are especially vulnerable right now to supply chain management issues. Make sure you have the in-house human resources it takes to ensure that warehouses managed during a pandemic are restored to pre-crisis stability. If you need help with inventory management, enterprise risk management, cloud migration, or other critical business operations, EstesGroup offers you a one-stop-shop approach to operational optimization.

Are you ready to talk to a software & vendor selection expert? Let’s begin a conversation today.

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Getting Selective with Software Selection

by EstesCloud | May 6, 2021 | Business Direction, Cloud, ERP Selection, Software

Begin by gathering both business requirements & software requirements

After all that inward looking, it is time for some more inward looking. It’s now time to set a basis for communication that will help keep current and future software projects on track. It’s time to begin the process of discovering and sorting out the real requirements for your business as they relate to software acquisition.

A conversation that leads to a complete requirement list

When it feels like every possible software and technology requirement is on the table, publish the list for your entire company to review it. Let the whole business know what software is under consideration and what you hope to achieve through the new software. This could be a subject for the next company-wide get-together or a post on the company intranet. Give everyone a little time to consider the potential requirement list and ask for feedback. The guy at the shipping dock might offer an idea no one yet thought of. A remote worker might demand additional integrations in order to optimize a virtual office.

Try to separate the team members from the business processes to let your selection project entertain every product or service that could benefit both people and infrastructure. This is especially important when considering ERP systems. Every software system has its challenges, but as companies grow and enterprise resource planning increases in complexity, due diligence in the software selection process will overcome both high level and more detailed problems along the way.

Your software selection team

Always choose a selection team that represents departments from across your business. You will have some managers and directors, but also include people who will benefit from working on this project by getting to know the bosses while contributing to the cause.

Your potential requirements list is probably quite long, so take a comprehensive approach when it comes to team building. When it comes to software requirements, specification is key. When you have a talented team working together to brainstorm every potential problem and solution, you’ll likely surface a long list of needs and expectations. Likely some of the items are duplicates, or very similar. Combine those and shorten the list a little. It is not yet time to strike any ideas out yet. And avoid assumptions: take time to understand what the proposals really mean lest any good ideas become diluted beyond the original intention.

Look for requirements that probably cannot be helped by this particular software acquisition. Don’t simply strike the idea; move it to another list for future consideration. Someone thought they had a requirement to be solved, so keep it as it still needs a resolution, just not now with this particular software.

Prioritize software selection process outcomes

Prioritizing is the next step. Split your list into one section that truly is a requirement and another that is very nice to have but truly less than a requirement. Sort each section into your best consensus of priority. Theoretically, the required list is all number one, but there is still a good chance that less than 100% can be attained. A software selection process doesn’t always end with a new software. Keep an open mind when considering all options and how they might affect your business. Stuck on old software or technology? A growing manufacturing company will struggle without the move to an ERP software, and an ERP system will most likely benefit from a cloud hosting environment. Know your history and know your goals and choose your system and its deployment model wisely.

Communicate still more

Time now for more communication. This time upwards: meet with your executive sponsor and consider each requirement again. Be certain your sponsor agrees with your breakout of priorities and good ideas, and also with the sorting. Your sponsor might have other ideas too on how to revise some items, or they might have entirely new items for the list. Your executive sponsor must agree with the requirement list and commit to supporting your future efforts.

Communicate again with the rest of your business by sharing the current requirement list and a second list of items you hope to achieve. Let all know you will soon look for software that meets every one of the required points and as many as possible of the nice-to-have list as well. Be sure to thank everyone who helped with requirement points and with the enterprise evaluation of your requirements.

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How To Begin Your Software Selection

by EstesCloud | Apr 19, 2021 | Business Consulting, Business Direction, Cloud, ERP, ERP Selection, Software

Toward a Simple Software Selection Process

A very typical software selection process begins by clicking on “I am interested” after reading about a software product. Someone replies, and pretty soon a salesperson has you convinced their product will have you living the Life of Riley.

Is that narrative oversimplified? Maybe, but all of us have followed that process at times and possibly even with enterprise-level software products such as Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP solutions.

A simple selection process can work because there are many very good systems on the market, and they are flexible enough that good value is there for many businesses. None of us knows what we don’t know. Choosing an off-the-shelf software could lead to an 80% or even 90% satisfaction, but the 100% solution we hoped for could be beyond reach.

Software Selection First Steps: Look Inward First

Rather than taking a chance, consider yourself, your business, and your co-workers. You might have had past success at developing workarounds to resolve little shortfalls in software. The cost wasn’t too high, and the work still got done. There is nothing wrong with this approach and possibly a lot right. The workaround gave someone in your business a successful win. You did not need to pay any additional money to arrive at your satisfactory solution.

The Old ERP & the New ERP

On the other hand, you might want to replace an ERP that your business has used for many years, and although it began as off-the-shelf, you have modified and customized it over the years. Your users are comfortable with the software, and their work gets done well. That legacy system is not available now and can no longer be maintained. Do you want to get another similar system and begin again to modify and customize it?

Software in the Cloud

Today we need to consider the platform in addition to the software itself. In the past, companies bought software and installed it on in-house servers and managed the system internally. However, many ERP systems run in the cloud now.

Cloud-ready software, like SYSPRO or Prophet 21, requires substantially less money up front and the maintenance is provided as a part of the ongoing fee. For many the total cost of ownership is much less than running a system on your own server.

But What Cloud?

There are several varieties of cloud, beyond cumulus or cirrus. A very common option is a shared system provided by the software company. The software is a single instance and each multi-tenant customer has secured storage for their own data. You set your own configurations and can personalize user interfaces. But little or no customization is available, as that single instance is shared. Integration of other systems might be possible, but automatically updating files or uploading data from another system will be tightly controlled by the software cloud managers.

A second option is single tenancy where you have your own instance of the software in the cloud and your data is similarly secured. Here your options to customize or integrate are a little more flexible, but the ongoing cost is higher.

The third option is to purchase the on-premises version of the software but install it in a cloud server. With this option, the system is yours to customize or integrate as your business needs. But the system is yours so that your business also must manage ongoing maintenance. You have many options related to the software and to the platform.

Consider carefully how your system will work best for your needs and with your style of operating. Only after knowing your own business and its culture and style should you begin a search for your future software.

Do you need help with software selection or management? Contact us now, chat with us, or ask an expert about IT or ERP. We love to talk about ERP software. EstesGroup provides a unique value to businesses like yours: we understand your software and its underlying technology. Learn more about our EstesCloud managed services and how EstesGroup ERP & IT consultants work together to help you optimize your infrastructure so that you can focus on the work you love while we secure your foundations.

ERP Implementation Best Practices: Closing the Gaps

by Brad Feakes | Dec 3, 2020 | Epicor 10, ERP Consulting, ERP Implementation, ERP Selection

ERP Implementation Challenges

Bridging functionality gaps in ERP is one of the great challenges in an Epicor implementation, or of any enterprise resource planning project. There are often visible gaps between a company’s business requirements and the system’s ability to address them. In a perfect world, the needs of the company perfectly match the capabilities of the system they are implementing. In practice, the gaps between an organization and its ERP application can be significant, and closing these gaps can take significant effort. The inability to successfully close these gaps is a leading cause of project failure. This guide will help you understand a few ERP implementation best practices to help address the great challenge of closing the gaps.

ERP Customization

Find creative ways to use the system’s standard configurations to address the needs of your business.
Adjust your business processes to conform to the system’s recommended best practices.
Tailor the software in one form or another to provide needed functionality.
Combine the above methods to achieve a hybrid solution.

So why do businesses feel the need to tailor the applications they implement? ERP software customization is a means of closing gaps. Sometimes, it is the preferred means of addressing challenges before they start. Often, gap closure will involve some form of customization. The overall level of ERP project complexity will expand with increasing challenges and risks. In general, the different types of obstacles encountered in an ERP project can be grouped under one of a few headings. Customizing an ERP application allows you to do a number of things and to circumvent a number of issues:

Automate tasks. The standard system is too transactional and user-intensive.
Prevent errors. The standard system allows for too many points of failure as a function of user entry.
Integrate with third-party systems. The standard system does not provide specific functionality, necessitating a tertiary application. Similarly, the standard system does not integrate with the third-party module in question.
Extract and display data. The standard system’s out-of-the-box reports do not present the necessary information needed by the business.
Add business logic. The standard system does not possess logic needed by the implementing company.

The Total Cost of Ownership of an ERP Solution

The rule of thumb that came out of the first generation of ERP systems was simple: avoid customizing the ERP system at all costs. Fit the business to the software, not the software to the business. Considering the comparatively rigid systems of the era, this recommendation seemed valid. Earlier-generation ERP systems contained limited toolsets for tailoring the application to meet the needs of the implementing organization. As such, customization essentially implied a source code modification, and such changes were detrimental to the long-term maintainability of the systems involved.

ERP Implementation Best Practices Evolving

Next-generation ERP systems contained improved toolsets to provide non-source-code customizations that were upgradable and maintainable, but the disruptive effects of customization on the implementation projects nevertheless continued unabated. Why do ERP customizations continue to create challenges to organizations?

Customizations are disruptive—they introduce logic to the application that is not native to the core system. They may also behave in ways that are unlike the rest of the system, and tend to be less comprehensive than the source code that they are layered upon.

As they are developed and refined, they often contain bugs. For example, the custom business logic may be invoked at times when it isn’t expected, or may not be invoked in all cases that require it. Working though these bugs can be challenging. Moreover, when customizations run into bugs or undocumented features of the core application, an abundance of unexpected behaviors can result.

ERP Toolsets & Project Success

Everything said, how do companies successfully leverage the customization toolsets available? How do they provide the necessary functionality to their organizations without compromising project success? Consider the following observations:

On one hand, we’ve seen companies significantly customize their application in an organized and methodical fashion. Therefore, the customizations produced a limited disruption to the implementation.
On the other hand, we’ve encountered other companies that only modestly customized their application. The modest number of customizations significantly disrupted the implementation. Why?

Organize to Optimize Your ERP Software

The level of customization and the level of organization of a project are closely tied. Therefore, companies that organize their customization efforts carefully are much less likely to experience problems caused by customizations. Conversely, poorly organized customization efforts will create additional issues that will add complexity and disruption to an implementation that is already, by its very nature, complicated.

Quantifying the impact of these two variables (customization and organization) can be difficult, but a simple mathematical model might help to model their interaction.

Assume that a project’s level of disorganization can be scored on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being highly organized and 10 being highly disorganized.
Similarly, assume that a project’s level of customization can be scored on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being lightly customized and 10 being highly customized.
Additionally, assume that a project’s success can be scored on a scale of 1 to 100, and anything over a score of 20 is a bad thing. For example, the project could be over budget, behind schedule, or low in scope or quality. In this context, a score of 30 might imply a project that went live late, or had to cut scope, or exceeded the budget, while a ruination score of 100 might represent a project that is years late, millions over budget, and so poorly designed that it will fail to go live.

A score of 1 (very low customization, very low disorganization) represents a very low risk score and a score of 100 (very high customization, very high disorganization) represents immense and catastrophic risk to your ERP and to your business:

The simple lesson to be learned here is that an organization can perform reasonable amounts of customization to their ERP application without destroying an implementation. A company needs to take steps to utilize an organized approach to customizing their application.

ERP Risks

A challenge with this dilemma is the reality that most companies do not launch an ERP implementation project believing that they will customize the application significantly. As a result, when these change requests surface, they are normally ill-equipped to handle them, and things soon spin out of control. As such, many customers come to us asking the simple question: What does it mean when one’s customization methodology is highly organized?

ERP Project Risk Management

There are a number of characteristics that an organized implementation possesses. They include the following:

First and foremost, governance is in place, to control when customizations occur. Governance is the best way to keep the degree of customization from spinning out of control.
Solutions are tracked. The implementing company understands which modules have been customized and which reports have been altered. They have identified all truly custom entry screens, reports, and dashboards. This information is put to use whenever an ERP upgrade occurs or a new site goes live.
Business requirements and functional specifications are developed as solutions are developed, and these solutions are constructed using these specifications.
Guidelines are defined ahead of time. These are conventions that describe how custom solutions are to be constructed, organized, and named.
Solutions go through careful testing. They receive a unit test to ensure that the basic requirements have been met, and then a regression test, to ensure that they function appropriately within the overall application, and don’t break anything else.
Solutions go through careful deployments to the production environment. When old solutions replace new solutions, the old solutions are removed from the environment as part of the deployment, to prevent the environment from getting cluttered with old, inactive solutions.
When an ERP module is customized, the developers take into account the full suite of new and pre-existing customizations, as to ensure that new elements are optimized to efficiently work in concert with existing custom solutions.
Environments are constructed as to segment various activities such as functional design, custom solution development, and upgrade verification. When these activities overlap, conflicts invariably arise, and these can slow down the progress of a project and create needless confusion.

The Goal of an ERP Implementation is Twofold

How do you implement a system that satisfies the needs of your business? How do you stay scalable and maintainable and also support the future requirements of your organization?

The future of your business is always unknown, and often unpredictable. Therefore, cutover will surely present new unknowns. Heavy system customization often results in the achievement of the goals of business needs. Unfortunately, this can risk the long-term maintainability of your ERP system. An organized and methodical approach to system customization supports a more successful implementation. Moreover, it provides easier long-term maintenance of your application. Likewise, it holds the ability to support the business requirements of the future.

After the ERP Vendor, the Software

Are you trying to improve your manufacturing processes? Do you need user training to empower your ERP project team? Are you looking for the competitive advantage that cloud ERP offers? Do you need help with data migration to an ERP hosting environment for a complex enterprise resource planning software like Prophet 21, E10, or Sage? We have experts for everything ERP, whether you need Epicor consulting assistance or QuickBooks hosting guidance.

For 17 years, EstesGroup has served clients at every step of the ERP implementation process. We offer real-time support 24/7/365 for your implementation team. We optimize your technology, and we lighten the burden on the precious human resources that make your company unique. Your team can work according to their talents, while we do the routine work involved in managing your ERP software and the technology that supports it.

Learn More About ERP Implementation Best Practices for Cloud

A good ERP balances your budget, opens your resources to new possibilities and opportunities, and improves everything from customer relationship management to industry-specific compliance and cybersecurity. ERP cloud hosting provides an ideal platform for your work. Request an ECHO demo today to see how EstesCloud managed services can help your business.

An End User’s ERP History – from Baan IV to E10

by Brad Feakes | May 21, 2020 | Epicor 10, ERP, ERP Implementation, ERP Selection

Back when I still worked for a manufacturing company, in a magnificent sprawl of factory and office buildings, I had a reputation for being a fast walker.  I’d bustle through the labyrinthine hallways of the office and scale the grand aisles of the factory. With my head down in a shoegazer’s stride, I’d often come into near collisions with whiteboards or drill presses.  At the time, I was shaped roughly like a college linebacker, and my coworkers would clear the path when they saw me coming.  “Slow mind, fast feet,” one of my supervisors once remarked.  When people asked why I walked so fast, I replied, “It’s hard to hit a moving target.”  In a company that had a reputation for random layoffs, this was a sufficient answer — an insider’s aphorism.

ERP systems are rarely a moving target.  A stationary target is usually either a soon-to-be-victim or a roadside misfortune.  When I first entered the business world, my company was replacing its mishmash of homegrown systems with Baan’s flagship ERP solution, Baan IV, well before the panic of Y2K. New to the company, and still learning what I could do to get by, it was no big deal to me.  But to my wiser, more experienced coworkers, it was an all-out affront to their sensibilities.  These were folks accustomed to the keyword-laden world of green screens and shortcuts, for whom the art of the double-click was still a work in process.  So, the transition took a while, in spite of the new software being pretty solid.

Baan, as the company proper, went into a tailspin shortly thereafter, and its software was absorbed into countless versions of other applications. I once sat down with a veteran consultant who had been with SSA Global and then with Infor during these transitions. He gave me the entire evolutionary history of the Baan product over a burger and fries.  It was quite a mouthful coming from one of the application’s dedicants.

When it came time to replace our own ERP system, the manufacturing company I was with opted to move to Epicor’s Vantage ERP system.  Compared to Baan’s Unix-based architecture, Vantage’s look and feel seemed pretty modern and user-friendly, especially in the mid-to-late 2000s.  Now, Epicor’s manufacturing ERP product had its own special evolutionary history, and we happened to hitch a ride to its moving train while it was plowing forward at full speed, but still halfway from its destination.  Vantage had originally been architected using the Progress 4GL business language, both at an application and database level.  But as Microsoft became the dominant application platform, the company opted to begin a migration process to a fully Microsoft-centric stack. And a long strange trip it’s been.

From my own starting point, I’ve been able to watch other customers navigate the challenges of simplicity and performance vs. currency and maintainability, all the way through to the challenges of new functionality vs. platform stability. 

Brad Feakes

President, EstesGroup

Epicor’s Vantage 8.0 version was the first step in this evolution.  Being a client-server application, they replaced the Progress client with a Windows-based client, while retaining the Progress business logic layer on the server.  Better still, they now provided the option for a SQL Server database.  The initial results were… bumpy.  One can imagine why combining so many architectural layers would certainly be a veritable middleware nightmare. Earnest effort went into remedying these issues, and the result was Vantage 8.03, a more stable version of 8.0.

A major functionality uplift had been teased for a number of years, under the guise of “Version 9.” While still possessing the same basic backend architecture, the features and capabilities of the new version were to be a real advance from the current release.  The first installment of this promise was Epicor version 9.04, and the results were less than optimal.  Sure, the functionality was there, but the performance was abysmal.  At my own company, we never got so far as to implement 9.04, given that 9.05 was released on its tail in short order and addressed some of the issues that plagued its antecedent. But at some point, it became known that 905 itself was going to be the last major release on the current architecture, that the next major release would be devoid of the Progress-based 4GL backend, and that in its place would reside an entirely Microsoft-centric server-side stack.

This finally came to fruition with Epicor’s version 10.  And the challenges experienced by the user community were similar to the previous versions.  In moving to E10, Epicor essentially rewrote much of the application’s backend, turning those in the end-user community on the bleeding edge essentially into beta testers. The challenges of working through the kinks involved were significant.  Now a consultant and no longer a customer, I experienced the application from a new perspective as I tried to confirm just which of the legacy version’s features could and could not be supported by the new version.  Working in some of the more complex areas of the application, such as product configuration and MRP, I’ve encountered many show-stopping issues that put customer implementations in holding patterns.  As with 904, a relatively small subset of Epicor customers went live on 10.0, many opting to wait until 10.1’s more stable version was released.  Since 10.1, the version has been remarkably stable, with each new version offering more and more capabilities without undermining previous functionality.

My ERP journey over the past 20 years has been a long, strange trip indeed. From my own starting point, I’ve been able to watch other customers navigate the challenges of simplicity and performance vs. currency and maintainability, all the way through to the challenges of new functionality vs. platform stability.  Looking back, I’ve wondered if I’ve learned anything from my IT travels.  Though I won’t scribe any hard-and-fast rules into marble, there are a few things that are worth mentioning:

Software goes through cycles. The stability, capabilities, and performance of an application all vary over time.  Understand this and plan accordingly.
A company’s success with an ERP implementation varies according the point in the cycle where they enter the fray. Entering on a stable version might not give you all the bells and whistles you desire but will likely make for a more successful implementation.
Stability applies to an ERP vendor as much as it does to their software. When you engage an ERP vendor, it’s good to understand the company’s stability.
An unstable vendor may quickly devolve into an unstable platform or, worse, into an unsupported platform.
When upgrading an application to a more recent version, be leery of the “bleeding edge” syndrome. All other things being equal, it’s good to let the major version of an application settle down before taking it on.  Premature adoption can lead to catastrophic implementation.

Interested in having us help your business with ERP or IT? Ready to migrate to the best cloud (EstesCloud)?

What Are My ERP Private Cloud Options

by Brad Feakes | Feb 10, 2020 | Cloud, Epicor, Epicor 10, ERP Risks and Challenges, ERP Selection, Hosting, Managed IT Services, Prophet 21, Security

Not All Clouds are Created Equal: Reviewing Your ERP Private Cloud Options

It’s no secret that cloud computing has been increasingly finding its way into businesses by providing reliable solutions to increasingly challenging problems. But for ERP customers with complex environment maps, an unmitigated move to the cloud might feel risky. For this reason, some customers look for middle options between full cloud deployments and on-premise installations. Private cloud hosting is one such midpoint, and it’s not uncommon for customers to approach the opportunities of cloud computing in search of a private solution. But will this option leverage the obvious benefits of the cloud, while effectively providing the necessary support for your complex ERP ecosystem?

Your ERP installation is rarely an isolated entity—it is part of an integrated ecosystem of applications and processes, with various third parties, bolt-ons, and in-house applications interacting with the core ERP system. As such, an ERP system is not always easily extracted from its ecosystem, as such an extraction is something akin to major surgery. If you’re looking at handling this complexity with private cloud ERP deployment options, there are basically two management directions you can take. You can build a private cloud using AWS, Azure, or Google, or you can work with an already established team of experts in private cloud hosting. Let’s explore these options in greater detail.

Private Cloud in AWS/Azure/Google

The big players in cloud computing entered the application hosting game a while ago – Amazon, Azure, and now Google. The option here would be to build out your virtual machine architecture within one of these clouds, and install your applications within this architecture, while working in turn to integrate your company-specific application ecosystem with the new ERP infrastructure.

While this eliminates the hardware investment of an on-premise install, you are still responsible for all the administration activities, at the server, application, and database levels. And if your Epicor Admin should win the lottery, you are left scrambling for options. If you lack the internal resources and need to bring in assistance in the administration of the application, you are now adding another party to work within this ecosystem. Moreover, to your monolithic cloud provider, you are still just a number, and the service levels you can expect to receive will indicate as much. Will the hosting company be responsive and listen to your apps and your business needs? Is there a human voice to reach out to when issues occur?

Private Cloud Through the Estes Group’s ECHO Managed Hosting

EstesGroup’s EstesCloud Hosting, or ECHO for short, is our hosting platform. For one monthly price, we include all the functionality and support you need to keep your hosted applications running properly for your business. While providing the access level that companies look for in private cloud solutions, we also provide the support and expertise that a big box store cloud partner can’t provide. One phone call puts you in touch with our support team. Well-versed in Microsoft’s full stack, we cover your servers with 24x7x365 EstesCloud Monitoring. We cover the backups and disaster recovery, and we protect your users with EstesCloud identity management under the security of EstesCloud-managed Firewalls.

We have experience in moving many customers to a private cloud environment, while working with them to integrate their hosted ERP platform with their family of related applications. With this experience comes the knowledge in working with protocols, networks, VPNs, and database connections, and we leverage this knowledge when engaging a customer.

In summary, some of the benefits of the EstesGroup’s ECHO Private Cloud Hosting solution include:

Known monthly expense, with no large capital expenses
Growth with your business supported by continual and customized service
Proven backup and disaster recovery playbooks
Easy, secure access from anywhere you wish
No Server Maintenance
No need to upgrade or repair hardware

When it comes to deploying your ERP architecture, there are clearly a number of different options, and the implications of the decisions made will have a lasting effect on your company’s future. Are you considering spinning up your own private cloud to host your ERP application? Drop us a line first, and let us help you explore your options.

Interested in learning more about Managed Hosting for Epicor ERP or Prophet 21 ERP?

Visit our Managed Epicor ERP Hosting page

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