Recently I’ve had a few people say to me that they’re not comfortable relying on Epicor’s Service Connect.

I can understand that.

Service Connect has always been a bit of a dark art. People who know how to get the best out of it are few and far between, and that’s a problem for a tool that might act as a vital junction among your systems.

And this kind of tool IS increasingly vital.

Everything needs to talk to everything else these days, and things like Service Connect, which enable that communication, are only going to become more and more crucial.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, though, and say that if you already have Service Connect running, and it’s doing what you want, you should be happy with that for now. There is nothing wrong with it. It’s as good as it ever was, and there’s no sign that Epicor is going to pull the plug on it any time soon.

Plus, most of the alternatives gleaming all shiny in vendors’ sales packages - they’re going to cost you, one way or another. You need a real reason to switch, not just a sense that the dust might be building up on what you have.

So what IS a reason to switch?

If you’re needing to do something entirely new, and you’d need to find someone to create complex new workflows in Service Connect (assuming you can’t do them in-house), you should weigh the costs of moving across to a new solution. Not forgetting to count the expense and hassle of changing what’s already working.

And if you don’t already have Service Connect, I’d be hesitant to recommend it as a new installation at this point.

That is hassle. Is there a halfway house?

Glad you asked.

Service Connect traditionally calls directly on Epicor ERP via the client libraries, which is a very intimate kind of connection.

But it also works quite well for REST calls. And Epicor ERP is now all in on REST.

So you can kill two birds with one stone here.

You can move the logic of what you want to do into the ERP system itself, and expose simplified calls as Epicor Functions available via REST. That future-proofs your functionality, and widens the pool of people who can work on it, even if there’s a lot of bespoke.

You can then make the REST calls from Service Connect, and the workflows should be as simple as humanly possible.

Not only does that remove most of the problems associated with using Service Connect in the first place (reliance on something that is difficult to support and few people understand well), it becomes relatively trivial to replace with an alternative tool at any time.

If you keep all Epicor ERP logic within Epicor ERP, Service Connect - or any replacement - has no need for tight coupling, and whoever is managing that part of the system needs no direct knowledge of the ERP’s workings.

TL:DR - REST is now the way to go.

But the key thing to realise is that you can go REST-based now, and move on from Service Connect later as and when it makes sense.

And at META eight we’re experienced with both Service Connect and REST, so if you want even-handed advice feel free to talk.