Customer Success - Epicor Vantage®

NetAdvantage® for .NET was Critical in Reducing Development Time of Epicor's Vantage ERP Solution by 25% Enabling it to Reach Market Ahead of the Competition

Fortune® magazine has named Epicor Software Corporation (Epicor) one of the "Business 2.0® 100 Fastest-Growing Tech Companies" because of their success in providing business software solutions to companies around the world. Epicor is a global leader dedicated to providing integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) and professional service automation (PSA) software solutions to midmarket companies and divisions of BusinessWeek®'s Global 1000.

The Challenge

Based on the demand from customers for more agile and adaptable business software, Epicor recognized the need to re-architect its existing client-server ERP system, Epicor Vantage, into a fully service-oriented architecture (SOA). This would uplift already proven and robust server object code as business services and expose them through industry-leading Microsoft® .NET smart client technology. While this was considered a major re-engineering project, time-to-market was a key concern.

A major goal for the project was to develop the most flexible, rich and leading edge user interface in the market. Having selected the .NET platform, the development and product marketing teams evaluated the many vendors specializing in advanced controls and selected Infragistics because of the breadth of "out of the box" functionality and the resulting capability the NetAdvantage® for .NET controls would provide to their end users.

"We selected Infragistics NetAdvantage as the basis for our client controls as we needed to rapidly implement a sophisticated UI presentation layer while allowing our developers to concentrate on other areas of the architecture," said Tony Wilby, senior development director at Epicor.

The Solution

Once the decision to use Infragistics NetAdvantage for .NET was made, Epicor divided their developers into two teams: one focused on server-side development and the other focused on client-side development. This was to ensure true separation of the service layer. Those on the client side concentrated on using Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET and NetAdvantage to build the smart client in C# running on the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Although there were a large number of developers working on the smart client, they came from a diverse programming background in both object-oriented and non-OO technologies. To make the development process easier, Epicor created Form templates for the different classes of Forms that would be implemented within the application. All of the developers received training on how to use NetAdvantage for .NET, as well as how to derive specific application Forms based on the provided templates.

"In this way, we were able to migrate developers from non-OO technologies to Microsoft .NET rapidly. The use of robust, well-documented and feature-rich Infragistics controls was key to our ability to be successful in this migration of skill sets," said Wilby.

Using NetAdvantage for .NET to build the application allowed Epicor's development team to concentrate on the business logic of the application rather than buidling reusable components themselves. Wilby and team leveraged many of the NetAdvantage for .NET components to build a rich user interface that would create a positive user experience.

"One of the components that we found invaluable was the WinGrid™," said Wilby. "This grid is implemented throughout the smart client giving the consistent ability to rearrange columns, sort, group by, freeze frame, etc.  We found it easy to implement and extremely flexible."

The WinGrid is a hierarchical data grid control with full support for bound and unbound data display that surpasses other .NET grids on the market and shifts your data-driven Windows Forms applications into a new realm of more productive possibilities. WinGrid supports complex data entry scenarios, custom layouts, rich printing, print preview, easy interoperability with Microsoft Excel®, Adobe® PDF and Microsoft XPS file formats, and an almost unlimited array of look and feel options.

Success

Wilby estimates that using the NetAdvantage for .NET controls saved six months of development time allowing Epicor to release the first version of the product within just eighteen months of its initial project kick-off. That made Epicor one of the first software providers in the ERP space to release a fully functional, .NET-based SOA solution. "The use of Infragistics NetAdvantage was critical in attaining this objective," attested Wilby.

Not only did the Epicor development team deliver Vantage on time, but the manufacturing solution has experienced great success. Wilby credits this success in part to NetAdvantage's ability to deliver great user experiences. "The use of feature rich and consistent UI controls has benefits all the way from initial demonstration of the product to prospective customers, through to acceptance by customer end users," he said.

Since the introduction of Epicor Vantage, over two thousand systems have been shipped meaning that over 40,000 end users now benefit from using the application. Wilby said that market acceptance has been phenomenal, and Epicor has won a number of industry awards including a "High-Tech Award for Innovative Product/Technology" from the American Electronics Association (AeA), a "Technology & Business Software Enabler Award" from Start-IT™ magazine, a "Golden Bit Award" for best ERP solution, and a "Golden Process Award" for best enterprise business application from Teleinfo magazine.

"Infragistics continues to be a valuable and flexible partner to Epicor," said Wilby. "We have a great relationship with the senior development team and have recently implemented Infragistics NetAdvantage as part of our upgrade to .NET 3.0. Most notably, as part of that upgrade we have implemented Infragistics Theming and Styling throughout the Epicor product in order to provide the capability to theme the application to reflect the corporate branding of our customers in their implementations of our product."

For more information about the NetAdvantage for Windows Forms controls described in this success story please visit:
http://www.infragistics.com/dotnet/netadvantage/winforms.aspx