Jad TerroAly Hashem

Overview

For 20 years, Epicor has been a recognized leader dedicated to providing leading edge enterprise software solutions to mid-market companies around the world. With over 20,000 customers, Epicor delivers end-to-end, industry-specific solutions that enable companies to immediately improve business operations and build competitive advantage in today’s real-time global economy. Epicor’s comprehensive suite of integrated software solutions for Customer Relationship Management, Financials, Manufacturing, Supply Chain Management, and Services Execution and Control provide the scalability and flexibility to support long-term growth. Epicor’s solutions are complemented by a full range of services, providing a single point of accountability to promote rapid return on investment and low total cost of ownership.

Aim of Epicor

The aim of EPICOR is to deliver world–class software and innovative technologies and to place the customers at the center of everything.

More than 20,000 customers, in over 140 countries, rely on Epicor to help them meet today's business challenges—and empower them for even greater success tomorrow. With solutions available in more than 30 languages, Epicor can support organization on a local, regional or multinational level.

It is designed for the unique needs of key industries, manufacturing, distribution, retail, hospitality and services. Epicor provides the end–to–end, industry–leading solutions and the domain expertise need to increase operational efficiency and drive competitive advantage. With over 20 years of experience in delivering innovative, award–winning solutions to their customers. Epicor is a strong and stable that can rely upon.

An Epicor solution is cost–effective, extremely powerful, and flexible. It is also designed to grow as your business grows. This will allow the customers who started small to continue to use Epicor, even as they have grown to be billion-dollar global enterprises.

Epicor in eCommerce

Today’s competitive manufacturing and distribution environments require business eCommerce software to do much more than simply process shopping transactions quickly and efficiently. Epicor Commerce can:

Manage customers Manage merchandise Manage inventory Manage order history basically the entire order life cycle

Manage the entire customer experience Increases Web presence Helps to drive new business Easily delivers an intuitive, personalized eCommerce shopping experience Does not need two separate systems to accept wholesale and consumer orders Eliminates the redundant databases found in most ERP eCommerce software. Orders can be submitted and processed immediately Allows the customer to use their terms or credit card for purchase On Premise or Hosted, the Choice is Yours Includes hosted environments where Epicor is responsible for all operations and/or

maintenance, and on-premise behind the firewall on an internal Web server, or with an ISP.

Epicor's eCommerce Management Console

The Epicor eCommerce solution provides a comprehensive framework and toolset designed to easily and efficiently manage the day-to-day operations of running business eCommerce software. Epicor's eCommerce Management Console enables the site administrator to control users, products, orders, content, and documents. The administrator can also easily build out additional pages within the Web sites. The toolset is designed so that changes to content and the Web site can be made without the help of a programmer or a graphic designer.

Epicor raises technology to a business level to deliver unprecedented business management that supports continuous performance through real-time, in-context business insight, is underpinned by agile and collaborative business architecture, and satisfies the need of enterprises worldwide, regardless of country, industry, or device for business anywhere.

Customer Relationship Management Sales Management Human Capital Management Service Management Product Data Management Planning and Scheduling Production Management Supply Chain Management Financial Management Enterprise Performance Management Governance, Risk, and Compliance Business Architecture Global Business Management

Epicor ERP System--A Next Generation Solution

The tools that people use to conduct business today have changed. Business is everywhere, business is real-time, and business is always online. The Internet and ubiquitous mobility play an essential part in the daily lives of the information-hungry global economy. The world has changed and with Epicor, ERP has too. Our global ERP system platform and enterprise applications give businesses of all sizes the flexibility needed to compete in today’s global marketplace.

Epicor's next-generation ERP system represents a game changing opportunity for business. Epicor is designed for the way people work today, yet is ready for how people will work tomorrow. Epicor delivers business without barriers.

Explore the Virtual ERP System Tour

Gone are the technology barriers, integration barriers, and accessibility barriers that stifle productivity. In their place is a newfound level of collaboration, visibility, and results. Epicor raises technology to a level that delivers an unprecedented ERP system that supports continuous performance through real-time, in-context Business Insight. At the core of Epicor is an adaptable and collaborative Business Architecture that satisfies the needs of any enterprise—regardless of country, industry, or device—to enable Business Anywhere.

Whether business focus is providing services, manufacturing products, distribution, or a combination of all of these, you have a fundamental need for precise and flexible resourcing, planning, and scheduling.

Support Overview

When you purchased your Epicor solution to run your business more efficiently, you invested in more than just software. You also purchased the expertise of our seasoned software support professionals. We've developed a number of state-of-the-art support tools and systems that will help you achieve a rapid return on your investment.

EPIC web: Epicor customers can find information specifically for them on EPIC web.  EPIC web, includes product downloads, the latest Support happenings, documentation and the information just for Epicor customers with current maintenance agreements. The key benefits of EPIC web are:   patch management system - you can be notified when a new download  is available for your product, the ability to customize your EPIC web site, see only the information you want to see and  manage your customer newsletter and other corporate communication subscriptions from one location. Password instructions and training videos.

Features and Benefits

Most of the questions asked by the senior level management before choosing an ERP system are:

Is your organization growing exponentially and in need of a system to keep up with your future growth expectations?

Are you planning on adding new businesses by growth or acquisition? Are you subject to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), international financial

reporting standards (IFRS), Sarbanes-Oxley, or any other national or international financial oversight?

Do you need financial transparency across all of your business units or is your organization still using spreadsheets to manage its financial health?

Are you using a highly customized system that does not allow the ability to upgrade to new, more efficient technology platforms?

These are some features which appeals to most of the senior level management before choosing Epicor Improving cash flow performance Increasing the accuracy of your costing Protecting your profit margins Reducing your inventories Shortening your product lifecycles Increasing loyalty of your customers by responding faster and more effectively

A. IT Service Management

IT failure can have a significant impact on an organization’s longevity let alone performance. Increasingly, IT departments are under pressure to align IT with strategic business goals and needs, improve performance, and make IT costs more transparent. In order to meet these objectives, IT managers require structured solutions and guidelines.

Benefits IT Service Management (ITSM) helps ensure business goals are met and value delivered by

providing both the business and the IT department with a common set of best practices and tools.

Epicor ITSM solutions provide a robust set of service management features that support key IT processes outlined by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

Incident management Problem management Change management Configuration management Service level management

The best practices of ITSM that it is cost-effectively Manage the strategic deployment of IT resources and assets. The net result—greater productivity, seamless change management, and efficient IT

service.

B. Professional Services Automation

Epicor’s Professional Service Automation (PSA) solution provides much more than traditional professional services automation functionality. It reaches across the entire enterprise and, as a result, provides numerous benefits to any services organization. Professional service organizations are feeling the strain and looking to more innovative systems that will reduce non-billable hours, streamline processes, and increase overall efficiency.

Benefits Proactively plan projects and make more informed decisions particularly when matching

skills and availability to project needs.

Painless time and expenses entry with submission and approval over the web, as well as flexible invoicing generation and detailed project billing features.

Minimize non-billable hours, maximize revenues, better plan your projects and produce more profitable engagements while increasing customer and staff satisfaction.

Track and access complete client relationship management from opportunity management to service delivery to billing to support.

Robust financials provide sophisticated functionality needed by services organizations including project accounting.

Make better decisions with integrated business intelligence solutions. Reports range from staff utilization, profitability and revenue by company, project and employee to plan versus actual on a project and missing timesheet reports.

Perform time and expense entry, approvals and access important project information, work in progress, accounts receivable and planned vs. actuals from anywhere at any time.

C. Software Solutions for Project Management

Epicor Project Management is a comprehensive solution for project managers who plan and execute simple or complex projects that can require intricate multilevel phases as well as strict project costing and billing. Project Management utilizes the detailed estimation, planning, scheduling, costing, and supply chain logistics of Epicor for complete control and analysis of any project. This comprehensive solution includes project planning, resource management, time and expense management, and billing and revenue recognition functionality to guarantee compliance with contract requirements and accounting standards. The main goal is to make project management easier, with accurate and up-to-date status information, meaningful alerts and embedded project analysis and reporting. This, combined with business process management, allows companies to maximize billable time, manage a large portfolio of projects, and gain distinct advantage over their competition.

D. Supply Chain Management software

Epicor offers an extensive range of supply chain management software as part of our end-to-end ERP solutions. Based on an industry leading service-oriented architecture (SOA), Epicor SCM is complemented by an array of enterprise capabilities, including customer relationship management (CRM), supplier relationship management (SRM), supply chain execution (SCE), and sourcing solutions.

Benefits

Epicor supply chain management software supports lean service organization requirements with comprehensive escalation management that enables you to manage customer service level agreements with full visibility of risks and potential compliance problems.

Preventive maintenance scheduling, coupled with serial number and contract management enables efficient planning of visits and resources leading increased customer satisfaction and reduced costs.

Comprehensive mobility options enable engineers on the road to maintain contact with the service center for efficient allocation of work, immediate update of completed work, and fast invoice turnaround.

Used in conjunction with Epicor’s integrated supply chain management software solution and comprehensive warehouse management system, you get unparalleled visibility into every facet of your operations and supply chain.

Epicor’s supply chain management and sourcing solutions are designed to simultaneously handle make-to-order, make-to-stock and engineer-to-order processing, giving you the flexibility to review and update plans as demand changes.

Epicor SCM and sourcing solutions can help you achieve your goals, including automated route scheduling systems that integrate GPS, digital mapping data, mileage, and driving directions to support a customer’s distribution needs worldwide.

E. Human Capital Management  

As competition for critical resources intensifies, managers, employees and candidates are demanding more from HR and human resource information systems (HRIS), moving beyond self-service to secure direct access to relevant information and processes whether in the office or on the road. Epicor Human Capital Management (HCM) provides these capabilities and more, helping you to manage your globally dispersed workforce, improve human resource processes, and enhance employee satisfaction for greater efficiency and cost savings across the enterprise.

Benefits

Epicor HCM automates your HR processes, enabling you to track, manage, and analyze all your employee data from application to retirement.

Gives greater control over staffing, time off, and benefits administration, with paperless workflows designed to walk managers and employees through common set up and administration operations for improved efficiency.

Powerful Performance Management, Reporting, and Analytics functionality helps to align corporate goals with employee performance, and empowers you with flexible tools to analyze applicant and employee data for better workforce management.

Epicor HCM is HR software that can be deployed to meet your organizational requirements without compromising functionality or data integrity.

To serve International HR needs, this HRIS web-based solution configures data fields to reflect the appropriate format based on employee location, as well as providing location-specific home pages delivering relevant communication and corporate standards.

Offers greater total business value by streamlining the entire employee life-cycle;

Manages recruitment and resourcing, training administration, benefits programs, and performance management;

Provides a wealth of information and advice to employees and candidates via direct access;

Promotes operational efficiency by allowing the entire workforce to focus on key company objectives;

Flexibility to deploy Epicor Payroll or connect to third party payroll solutions;

Delivers powerful business intelligence to enable strategic analysis of key business trends for better planning and informed decision-making.

G. Financial Management & Accounting Software Solutions

Epicor accounting software and financial management solutions are trusted fiduciary partners to help every business achieve sound financial management, from general ledger journals to sophisticated fiscal reporting, monitoring and enterprise performance management – wherever you do business.

Benefits

Epicor global financial management solutions are designed to automate and streamline your financial processes with tools and controls to support complex legislative requirements and create value through timely financial monitoring, including:

Accounts receivable, lockbox, credit and collections management. Accounts payable, electronic funds transfer, automated order matching. General ledger, allocations, consolidations and eliminations. Cash management, bank reconciliation, and statement interfaces. Payroll, fixed asset, and tax management. Budgeting, forecasting, and planning.

Improved Financial Transparency and Accountability

Regulatory bodies and audit firms advocate the need for improved financial governance, yet many businesses still deal with disparate financial data sources. While departmental spreadsheets and legacy systems may provide adequate financial accounting today, as the need for centralized financial information and financial visibility increases, they quickly lose viability. Epicor financial management software supports the need for financial visibility regardless of company size.

Global Financial Management Software Solutions

Over time, successful companies grow. Whether through acquisition or organic growth, more and more companies are wrestling with the complexities of managing multiple business entities. Epicor understands that managing disparate, often global business units offers unique challenges and opportunities with respect to tighter control, reduced operational cost, multinational settlement, and financial consolidation for enterprise-wide visibility.

To support these needs, Epicor financial management software offers robust multi-company, multi-plant or multi-warehouse operations, as well as inter-company transaction processing, and meets the needs of strong financial management on a global basis.

Comprehensive Global Accounting Capabilities for Growing Businesses

Epicor Financial Management software is built around a series of unique global engines, which in turn support the global nature of business today, enabling effective operations in existing and new markets as necessary

Helps every business achieve sound financial management, from general ledger journals to sophisticated fiscal reporting, monitoring and enterprise performance management – wherever you do business

H. Customer Relationship Management

Increase sales success, deliver superior customer service, and make informed, agile business decisions with Epicor iScala CRM.Epicor iScala CRM is easy to use, customize, and maintain, integrates with the Epicor iScala ERP system, and scales to grow along with your business. Epicor iScala

With Epicor iScala CRM you can increase sales success by shortening the sales cycle, improving pipeline visibility and close rates with leads and opportunity management, automated sales processes, quote creation, and order management. Able to deliver efficient, consistent customer service through a shared knowledge base and automated routing and queuing make it easy to serve those customers efficiently. Informed, agile decisions are easy with Epicor iScala CRM's comprehensive reports - letting forecast sales, measure business activity and performance, evaluate sales and service success, and identify trends, problems, and opportunities.

Epicor iScala CRM is accessible from either Outlook or the Web, so you can work with contacts, accounts, leads and opportunities online or offline. And, with its tightly integrated Sales and Customer Service functionality, it's easy to view, update, and share information across teams and departments. Importantly, Epicor iScala CRM is designed for ease of use, ensuring that your sales teams get started fast. In a nutshell, Epicor iScala CRM will help you reduce costs, improve your revenues, increase your customers' satisfaction and create a consistent favorable experience for your customers' interactions with your organization.

BENEFITS

Better visibility into the pipeline and across sales activities Improved quality of leads and closure rates All customer-related information and activities are stored in one place. You get a complete

view of your customers! Integrates with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office: e-mail time is less; reports can be

exported into Excel Reports are fast and easy, with over 130 standard reports "out-of-the-box" as well as the

ability to create your own. Your sales people will love it. It requires minimum training and interface looks like

Outlook. Therefore, using Epicor iScala CRM you will achieve high end user adoption rates and can get up and running in production operations in weeks, not months.

Easy to customize to reflect your specific sales process Out-of-the box integration with Epicor iScala ERP, so if you are an Epicor iScala ERP

client, you do not have to spend time on integrating, but rather you can focus on improving your customer relationship processes.

Integration with Epicor iScala ERP will give you access to Epicor iScala's rich sales order management and fulfillment functionality, including inventory visibility, multi-currency, VAT and local legislation.

Epicor iScala CRM functionality can be exposed through platform APIs for integration with third-party and Web services

Epicor iScala CRM is designed to meet budget and support needs for small-to-medium size businesses.

Delivery and implementation - which can be direct through Scala Business Solutions or through our certified partners - includes hands-on assistance with set-up and maintenance processes, along with comprehensive training and support resources.

I. Mobile Solutions for the Enterprise

With mobile solutions from Epicor, enterprises can support more customers, transactions, and products, and maintain a wider range of business partner relationships. Our mobile solutions securely and cost-effectively distribute and automate subsets of existing enterprise business systems outside of the company network—whether connected or remote.

Epicor customers can enjoy a rapid return on investment and can transact business where it happens, regardless of location. Epicor tools enable companies to easily deploy and manage mobile devices and services to many users and disparate geographies.

Benefits Manage and enhance business performance and productivity. Experience a significant

reduction in data entry. Reduce the time that your field teams spend on administrative tasks. Empower people, processes, and infrastructure to drive and sustain business growth. Speed up

sales cycles, service delivery and revenue generation by streamlining customer interactions. Enable the sales team to secure customer commitments quickly and spend more time selling and less time waiting for information.

Increase profits and improve supply chain management. Software specifically designed to streamline your inventory management capabilities and enhance your service levels helps you reduce stockouts and backorders.

Integrate the supply chain and increase the value of relationships. Optimize your warehouse management system with powerful supply chain software, and enhance customer interactions and service levels with real-time access to inventory levels, discounts, and special pricing.

Improve compliance. Comply more easily with legislation that requires companies in some industries to provide an auditable process route of their products, ingredients, packaging materials, and calibration and cleanliness of equipment.

Title

How and Who Benefits?

And

Barriers

Expected Improvements

A) Availability

Never closes, therefore available 24 hours, 7days of the week and throughout the year

Available at odd hours for the convenience of the customers.

Both the Buyer and Supplier Benefits. Barriers – unavailability of site due to

downturn. Barriers - Having strict business hours and

also due to lot of traffic.

Expanding geographical reach

Shorter Business cycle. Expanding Business

hours

Expanding customer base.

B) IT Service Management

The best practices of ITSM that it is cost-effectively

Manage the strategic deployment of IT resources and assets.

The net result—greater productivity, seamless change management, and efficient IT service.

Barriers - Power shutdown thus loss of Data Barriers - maintenance cost.

Easier and faster way to keep in touch with customers.

Better service on availability.

Have backup and reduce maintenance cost.

C) Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

SOA facilitates collaboration and information sharing throughout the organization and with external partners.

By exposing business processes, to improve operations.

SOA provides the ability to support a business model that crosses organization lines.

SOA enhances collaboration, facilitates end-to-end business processes, and improves operational effectiveness.

SOA allows customizing business processes without modifying source code.

To provide ways to meet increasing customer demands

Maintaining high quality and reliability.

Reducing costs, and raising technology to a next business level.

With SOA, making the processes in your systems match your business is a matter of configuration, not customization.

D) Supply Chain Management

Increased customer satisfaction and reduced costs.

Comprehensive mobility options enable engineers on the road to maintain contact with the service center for efficient allocation of work, immediate update of completed work, and fast invoice turnaround.

Unparalleled visibility into every facet of operations and supply chain.

Designed to simultaneously handle make-to-order, make-to-stock and engineer-to-order processing.

Giving the flexibility to review and update plans as demand changes.

Automated route scheduling systems that integrate GPS, digital mapping data, mileage, and driving directions to support a customer’s distribution needs worldwide.

Faster delivery of services and goods.

To keep track of goods through advanced tracking system throughout the world

Quality and quantity assurance.

E) Financial Management

Designed to automate and streamline your financial processes.

Controls to support complex legislative requirements.

Creates value through timely financial monitoring

Helps every business achieve sound financial management, from general ledger journals to sophisticated fiscal reporting, monitoring and enterprise performance management – wherever you do business.

Comprehensive Global Accounting Capabilities for Growing Businesses.

Improve Financial Transparency and Accountability.

Global Financial Solutions

Have tighter control and reduced operational cost

Food Service

No one ever claimed that running a restaurant was easy. In fact, restaurants stand as one of the toughest businesses to run, with a full 60 percent of them out of business within five years of opening their doors, according to Dun & Bradstreet statistics. Staying power in the food service industry obviously requires a great dining experience, but behind the scenes it requires good management practices, tenacity, and integrated technology that provides detailed performance reporting with affordable investment.

The Epicor® for Hospitality and Entertainment solution is answering that call for many food service operations around the world, including small chains, multi-branded conglomerates, and restaurant operations in hotels. Our food service software and restaurant management software solutions help businesses manage growth, refine operations, and increase profitability.

Restaurant Management Software Solutions Strong general ledger and equally capable sub-ledgers, along with multi-location inventory

management. Solutions to streamline processes, including allocations, purchasing, budgeting, workflow, and

document management for the food service industry. Integration to most POS systems to manage the reconciliation of cash location-by-location and

generate the requisite accounting transactions. Restaurant Management Software enables robust budgeting and forecasting applications allow

the appropriate balance of top-down and bottom-up collaboration. Automated allocation of central expenses is fast and easy for multi-site operations. Handles menu mix and recipes as well as inventory management to the ingredient level. Visibility to menu item profitability with costing for individual ingredients and rollups to menu

items. Track campaigns for product promotions, new product rollouts, new locations, and other events

to determine campaign effectiveness. Browser-based tool for requisitioning incorporates configurable workflow engine.

With award-winning integrated applications, Epicor for Hospitality and Entertainment is a powerful, flexible business system that’s just right for food and beverage service operations to react quickly, streamline operations, and maximize return on investment.

Hospitality Management Software for Hotels, Casinos, and Resorts

Hotels, casinos, and resorts around the world have chosen Epicor® hospitality management software products to be at the core of their company’s infrastructure because of the flexibility and scalability they provide for business growth. As your business expands, you can rely on Epicor for resort management software solutions and global support, whether you are opening location number three, 10, or 310.

Epicor for Hospitality is a global enterprise resource planning software solution designed for hospitality organizations. The solution goes beyond traditional ERP to provide financial management, business intelligence, and more. Our hotel management software, resort software, and casino management software all provide integrated solutions to help achieve maximum efficiency within your business.

Hotel, Casino, and   Resort   Management Software That Meets Your Business Challenges Interfaces to automatically synchronize data with your labor, property management, point-of-

sale, or food costing systems, providing accurate and timely data without the hassle and security risks involved in manual updates.

Sophisticated multi-company functionality that makes managing transactions between locations simple and easy.

Ability to consolidate reports for all entities at the corporate level and the flexibility to track financials for multi-concept operations.

Unparalleled reporting and analytical functionality including OLAP, data warehousing, dashboards, and alerts.

Hospitality Management Software from Epicor

With award-winning integrated applications, Epicor for Hospitality is a powerful, flexible business software solution that provides the flexibility and scalability you need to grow your company profitably by optimizing your most important resources. Our hotel management software, resort software, and casino management software provide best-in-class solutions for the hospitality industry.

Failed Projects

Reference: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222251/Customer_sues_Epicor_after_ERP_software_project_attempt_ends_in_big_mess_

A would-be Epicor customer is taking the ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor to court over a "big mess" of a software project that it says ended up battering its bottom line instead of improving operations.

In January 2010, commercial outdoor furniture seller ParknPool began looking for a system to supersede QuickBooks, which it had been using for some time with success, according to a lawsuit filed Nov. 23 in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia. The suit also names an Epicor partner, EstesGroup, which performed systems integration work on the job.

"QuickBooks was still working for us, it's just there was no growth potential," said Jim Fonner, administrative manager of the Lexington, Va., company, in an interview. "We were getting to the top of what QuickBooks could do."

ParknPool, which has about 20 employees, evaluated a number of systems and the final choice came down to Epicor and a product from Sage. Epicor got the nod after ParknPool came to believe it had a more tightly integrated system, he said.

An Epicor representative also told ParknPool that its current hardware setup would be sufficient and that a fully functional system could be installed fairly quickly, but neither promise held true, according to the company.

"Epicor said they could do it in seven weeks. We gave them seven months, and we got zero," Fonner said. "I couldn't even look at a profit-and-loss statement. We couldn't process orders. We were saying, 'QuickBooks is so much better than this' and we were paying $3,500 a year for it."

ParknPool is a "drop-ship" operation, wherein it acts as a type of middleman, keeping no items in stock. Instead, manufacturers, sometimes a number of them, ship orders once they are placed.

"Because we're a drop-ship business, we need to invoice our client after the last item ships, because they could ship from multiple locations," Fonner said. "The Epicor system couldn't deal with that."

Another snafu led to doubled commission payments for ParknPool's sales representatives, he said. ParknPool let the salespeople keep the extra money rather than deal with the morale problems taking it back would cause, according to Fonner.

Epicor also performed something of a bait-and-switch with ParknPool, initially saying that the company's need would be met with a specific set of software modules, but then saying that more were required after the project started, Fonner said.

For example, "we had to buy the manufacturing module in order for the payroll to work," he said. "We don't do any manufacturing. It was just a big mess."

Compounding matters was the fact that ParknPool was getting into its busiest season and needed a system in place by March of this year, according to the suit.

In February, ParknPool expressed its concerns about that deadline being met and in response, EstesGroup workers told them that the software being installed was an "untested and unapplied version" that had to be modified to accommodate ParknPool's drop-ship distribution model, according to the suit.

EstesGroup told ParknPool that it had the ability to complete the system, but also asked that it "close its contract with Epicor" and deal with it directly, the suit states. ParkNPool then signed a contract with EstesGroup but the company was unable to complete the job, it adds.

EstesGroup did not respond when ParknPool sent it a list of problems with the system and ultimately ceased working on it altogether, according to the suit.

ParknPool managed to get through its busy season despite the problems, partly because it had kept running QuickBooks in parallel with Epicor, but "it was a pretty scary time," Fonner said.

ParknPool's suit is asking for $250,000 in damages along with attorney's fees and other monies. The company has spent at least $250,000 on the Epicor project, according to Fonner. "It's in excess of that, but then you get into those costs you can't measure."

The company's bottom line has been affected as a result, he said. "We'll definitely take a loss this year."

Epicor "strongly denies the allegations made by ParknPool in its complaint," a spokeswoman said in a statement. "Our products, consulting personnel and partner performed well, all of which Epicor believes will be borne out as we defend our position in any proceedings, including counterclaiming for amounts rightfully owed by ParknPool."

ParknPool is still using QuickBooks and has no immediate plans to try another ERP project, according to Fonner.

"Since then, we've learned different ways of programming against QuickBooks, and kind of set our sights a little bit lower," he said. "It's not that we wouldn't do an ERP again, but that was such a bad experience, my staff here needs some time to get over being wounded like that."

Troubled ERP projects seem to be an unfortunate fact of life in the IT industry.

That said, there are multiple sides to the story in a given project failure, said Michael Krigsman, CEO of Asuret, a consulting firm that advises companies on how to run successful IT implementations.

In the case of ParknPool and Epicor, it's a "massive change to go from QuickBooks accounting system to an ERP system," he said. "Epicor is not QuickBooks -- they're going to function differently."

"What is clear is that neither Epicor nor the SI nor the customer entered this deal for it to fail," he added. "Assuming all parties are basically honest, there was a mismatch of expectations about what the system would do. Unfortunately, lawsuits like this present a highly one-sided version of the truth, and in most cases there's plenty of blame to go around."