Early in our launch process, I sensed there was something special about our partnership with Workato. We were collaborating to become the first leading ERP provider to embed their industry-leading iPaaS into our platforms as “Epicor Automation Studio, powered by Workato,” for “integration-led automations.” At Epicor, our guiding principle for product development is “made with you, for you,” and we truly embraced this by selecting Tim Shoemaker—a product manager with over 20 years of experience as an Epicor consultant—to help lead our initial launch.
As Tim can attest, integrating data between ERP systems and other applications has long been a challenge across the industry, due to the time and resources required. Many older integrations still rely on flat file setups, requiring tedious maintenance to sync data—imagine sending spreadsheets back and forth, updating one system whenever another changes. Even more modern custom API integrations demand highly skilled personnel to set up and maintain, especially with each system upgrade. Tim mentioned that a typical custom integration often costs upwards of $20,000 in professional services, not to mention the ongoing maintenance expenses to keep it operational after each upgrade. But I knew, as did the rest of our team, that our partnership with Workato, a disruptor as the first cloud-native offering in the Enterprise iPaaS market, would drastically reduce the time and resources our customers need to create and maintain their integrations and automations.
To build a strong partnership, I took an unusual step by inviting our Workato contacts to our regular launch meetings, which include our internal stakeholders representing all functional groups from development to sales and marketing. We were both nervous and excited about the big splash we were planning for the keynotes at our upcoming annual users conference, Epicor Insights 2022. I also invited Workato, despite having their own booth at our conference, to spend time with us at our Epicor Automation Studio kiosk, which had top billing in the centrally located Experience Zone. They also participated in our highly attended hands-on labs and breakout sessions.
The results following the conference were immediate and spectacular. One of our early customers, Hannah Willett from Stephen Gould Corporation, shared that a planned automation project, originally estimated to take one-two months using C#, was completed in just one-two weeks with Automation Studio. Our PR team quickly sprang into action, submitting Epicor Automation Studio, powered by Workato, as a nominee for various industry awards—an exciting move that resulted in five immediate wins. During her Epicor Insights 2024 presentation on their automation projects over the years, customer Vicki Hafele from Duncan-Parnell referred to the Epicor Automation Studio launch as “the dawn of a new day.”
This momentum has made Epicor Automation Studio our fastest-growing SaaS application. The cherry on top was that our first year demonstrating Automation Studio, powered by Workato, for the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises, helped propel Epicor into the Leader quadrant, as noted in Gartner’s high-level summary. Epicor Automation Studio has become a key component for our larger customers, helping them consolidate all their ERP platforms with leading CRM, HCM, and FSM solutions like Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceMax. We currently provide Automation Studio connectors for Kinetic, Prophet 21, Eclipse, Epicor ECM, Quick Ship, and Epicor CPQ. For non-Epicor ERP systems like SAP, these customers can leverage Workato directly to achieve similar integration.
Our partnership with Workato remains as strong as ever. In the early stages, our Workato contacts committed to participating in regular meetings with us for around 20 weeks. Two and a half years later, we’re still holding bi-weekly meetings, and we’re now entering an exciting new phase by partnering to test their latest AI@Work features, which promise to further accelerate our already streamlined development process. This ongoing collaboration has culminated in the award presented yesterday by Stephanie Dwight, VP, Automations and Applications at Workato, to our Product Managers, Michael C. Smith and Umang Bhatt, for ‘Customized Integration at Scale’ during the keynotes at the Workato Automate conference. Stephanie highlighted a typical Automation Studio customer experience, stating, "Epicor has been a true example of excellence at scale. This team has accelerated process order management across 40+ manufacturing plants, tracked sentiment and social chatter for marketing, and reduced project delivery times from months to weeks." My fellow Automation Studio launch stakeholders and I are incredibly proud of this achievement, knowing that it reflects both our hard work and innovative efforts, ultimately bringing tangible benefits to our customers by making integration and automation easier and more accessible than ever before.
