Slava Kravchuk on choosing B2B eCommerce technology. Atwix Team October 1, 2026 Updated at October 1, 2026 Distributors evaluating B2B eCommerce technology in 2026 hear the same pitch from every direction: a new platform, a smarter search engine, an AI layer, each presented as the investment that cannot wait. Atwix Founder and CEO Slava Kravchuk joined Jason Hein on the B2B eCommerce Association's B2B eCommerce Show to put those options in an order that holds up against a real ERP and real buyers. The conversation covers who to build for, what has to work before AI earns a budget line, how to vet an implementation partner, and why leaving a working platform alone is a decision with a price. Start with the customer, then the ERP. Requirements come from two groups, and neither of them is the loudest voice in the building. "It's important to not lose sight of who is your customer, who are you building this for." Slava's two groups are the external buyers who will use the site and the internal sales and service staff who assist a large share of B2B orders that will never go self-service end to end. Feature-level questions wait until both sets of needs are on paper. Underneath both groups sits one system that does not move. "ERP is central, that's the central system of records. Whatever your experience is, it has to be integrated with ERP." Pricing, inventory, order status, and customer terms live in the ERP, which is why he puts the integration ahead of every storefront feature. Atwix connects storefronts to Infor, Epicor, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and SAP Business One through its ERP integration services. Fix the fundamentals before you pay for AI. AI belongs at the end of the list, after the data and processes it depends on are clean. "Everybody is now putting AI on the front page, and some of those capabilities that are advertised are just phantom capabilities. They're not there." Slava's test for any AI feature is the process underneath it. "Messy process plus AI equals messy AI process." Before AI or advanced personalization, he named five things that have to work: * Site speed, which he called non-negotiable and measurable. * Search that resolves manufacturer part numbers, internal SKUs, the customer's own part numbers, and typos. * Inventory and order status synchronized with the ERP, fast and accurate. * Omnichannel order visibility, so an order placed by phone or email shows up online. * A mobile experience built for a buyer in a warehouse or on a job site rather than at a desk with a large monitor. His delivery advice follows the same logic: launch a focused first release in two or three months, prove value, collect real feedback, then expand. On the data side, Yaro Rogoza's ERP checklist for distributors and manufacturers covers the validation steps that keep "messy" out of the equation. Vet the partner as carefully as the platform. A strong platform with a weak implementation gets blamed on the platform, so the partner decision carries as much weight as the platform decision. Slava borrowed the GWC test from the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), which many B2B leadership teams run on. "Get it, want it, and capable of." * Get it: the partner understands your business, your industry, and your customer. * Want it: the partner is in it for a long-term relationship rather than a single closed deal. * Capable of: the partner has the platform expertise and engineering depth to deliver. He was specific about what to verify before signing. Ask for experience with your ERP, because back-end synchronization is invisible on launch day and, in his words, decides whether adoption lands at 2 percent or 20 percent. Ask for experience across more than one platform, because a single-platform vendor will recommend that platform whatever your fit. Then check the proof points you can confirm without taking anyone's word: reference customers, current clients, certification counts, and public contributions to open-source platforms. Leaving a working platform alone has a price. The "don't touch it" instinct protects nothing once the vendors underneath the platform stop supporting it. Slava pointed to Magento 1 merchants who postponed migrating until PayPal's API changes cut them off. The vendors backing an aging platform stop absorbing its compliance and maintenance cost, whether or not the merchant is ready. "The earlier you move on from investing into something you know you're going to throw away eventually, and switch to investing into something that will stay with you and keep compounding on that investment, that's a big realization once you put the numbers in." Jason's version of the same point was that an elephant is easier to eat in small bites than in one swallow, and deferred upgrades are the elephant. Connect what sales knows to what the site shows. Jason closed on the customer knowledge B2B companies hold and leave untapped. It sits in a CRM or in the heads of reps who visit customers in person, something no consumer retailer can match. Slava's answer was to connect that knowledge, wherever it lives, to the people building the digital experience, instead of designing the site in isolation from what sales knows. "Those who will be smart enough to actually take that route, not be afraid, experiment, and have the right partner to help them along the way, I think they will get ahead of the competition." Put your own list in order. If you are weighing a replatform, a search upgrade, and an AI initiative against each other, start where Slava did: who you are building for, what your ERP needs, and what has to work before AI gets a budget. If you want a second opinion on that order, bring your ERP, your top buyer accounts, and the age of your current platform. Talk to Atwix.

How Epicor Kinetic works: A guide for manufacturers. September 28, 2026 Updated onSeptember 28, 2026 How does Epicor work? The short answer is that Epicor Kinetic is a cloud-based ERP built specifically for manufacturers, not a generic business platform adapted to fit manufacturing. That distinction matters more than it might sound. This guide explains how the platform is structured, how data moves through it, and what it actually takes to get it working well. Table of content. Epicor Kinetic is an ERP system designed around how manufacturers actually operate. It connects production, inventory, purchasing, financials, quality, and the shop floor in a single platform, replacing the combination of disconnected spreadsheets, standalone accounting software, and tribal knowledge that most growing manufacturers eventually outgrow. The platform is cloud-first and runs on Microsoft Azure, which means no on-site servers to maintain and no manual updates to schedule. It is browser-based, so your team accesses it from anywhere without installing software on individual machines. Epicor Kinetic has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises for three consecutive years, and serves over 23,000 manufacturers globally. What sets it apart from a general-purpose ERP is that manufacturing is not one module among many. Production management, job costing, shop floor execution, MES, advanced planning and scheduling, and quality management are core capabilities built into the platform, not add-ons bolted on later. How Epicor Kinetic is structured. Kinetic is organized around the workflows manufacturers run every day. Each functional area connects to the others, so data entered in one part of the system flows automatically to the rest rather than requiring manual re-entry. Production, planning, and shop floor. Production management is where most manufacturers spend the most time in Kinetic. Jobs are created from sales orders or forecasts, with bills of materials and routings defining exactly what materials are needed and what operations the job passes through. Work orders move from department to department on the shop floor, with labor and materials posted against each operation in real time. Planning runs alongside production. Material Requirements Planning calculates what needs to be purchased or built based on current demand, open orders, and inventory levels. Advanced planning and scheduling tools help operations managers balance workload across work centers, identify bottlenecks before they affect delivery, and adjust priorities when things change. Shop floor visibility connects the floor to the office. With Epicor's Data Collection module or Advanced MES, operators log time and job status directly from the floor, giving supervisors and planners a live picture of where every job is without walking out to check. Financials, inventory, and quality. Financials in Kinetic are connected to operations, not sitting in a separate system. Job costs accumulate automatically as labor and materials are posted, so by the time a job ships, the actual cost is already in the system. Accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger, and financial reporting all tie back to the same operational data, which means your finance team is working from the same picture as your production team. Inventory management tracks stock in real time across locations, with lot and serial traceability available for manufacturers who need it. Purchasing connects to production requirements, so purchase orders are driven by actual demand rather than guesswork. Quality management handles inspection, non-conformance tracking, and corrective actions within the same platform. When a quality issue is caught on the floor, it is logged, tracked, and tied back to the job and the supplier, giving you the data to address the root cause rather than just the symptom. How data flows through Epicor Kinetic. This is the concept that separates ERP from a collection of standalone tools. * In Kinetic, a sales order becomes a job. * That job drives material requirements, which generate purchase orders. * Materials arrive and are received into inventory. * The job hits the floor, where operators log time and materials against each operation. * Costs accumulate automatically. When the job ships, the invoice goes out and the revenue posts to the general ledger. The entire transaction, from customer order to financial close, runs through one connected system. In practice, that flow only works as well as the configuration behind it. If routings do not reflect how the shop actually runs, the system tracks the wrong thing. If BOMs are incomplete, material requirements will be wrong. If labor standards are not set up, job costing will not be accurate. Getting Epicor to deliver that connected data flow requires the configuration to match the real operation, not just the theoretical one. Deployment options and AI capabilities. How Epicor Kinetic is deployed. Kinetic supports cloud, on-premises, and hybrid deployment. Cloud is the primary path for new implementations and where all future development is focused. On-premises remains available for manufacturers with specific infrastructure or compliance requirements, but Epicor has confirmed that the final on-premises feature release will be version 2028.1, with Active Support continuing through June 2029. For most manufacturers starting a new implementation today, cloud is the right starting point. What AI does in Epicor Kinetic today. Epicor has embedded AI across the platform in practical ways rather than as a separate layer. Epicor Prism is an agentic AI assistant that automates supplier communications, reduces RFQ cycle times, and helps teams get answers from ERP data without running reports manually. Grow AI provides context-aware suggestions during order entry, surfacing relevant products based on buying patterns. These are not future capabilities. They are available in the current release and are being actively used by manufacturers running Kinetic on the cloud. What makes Epicor Kinetic different from generic ERP. General-purpose ERP platforms cover a broad range of industries by design. That breadth comes at a cost for manufacturers: features like shop floor execution, job costing, MES, and advanced scheduling either do not exist or require significant customization to work for a manufacturing environment. Kinetic is built the other way around. The manufacturing workflows come first. BOMs, routings, work centers, job management, and shop floor data collection are built into the core platform, not configured from a generic foundation. For a manufacturer evaluating ERP options, that difference shows up in implementation time, user adoption, and how much configuration work is needed before the system reflects how the business actually runs. How EC Solutions helps manufacturers get Epicor working. Epicor Kinetic is a capable platform. How well it works depends almost entirely on how it is set up. A system configured around your actual workflows, with routings that reflect how your shop runs and cost structures that match your real operation, delivers the visibility and control the platform promises. A system configured generically delivers frustration. EC Solutions has been implementing Epicor for manufacturers since 2004. With over 1,000 successful projects and 100+ satisfied clients, its starting point is always the same: the operation itself. How jobs flow, where the bottlenecks are, what the reporting needs to show, and what the team is realistically capable of adopting. The software configuration follows from that. If you are evaluating Epicor or trying to get more out of a system that is already in place, that is the conversation EC Solutions is set up to have.

Axya secures $17 million CAD in funding to help manufacturers modernize procurement with AI. Sep 24, 2026, 09:30 ET New funding will accelerate development of Axya's AI-powered procurement platform, expand its geographic reach, and scale its engineering and go-to-market teams MONTREAL, Sept. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Axya, the AI-powered procurement platform that automates sourcing and purchasing for manufacturers, announced a $17 million CAD Series A funding round to enhance its platform and AI capabilities as it expands into new markets and scales its team to meet increasing demand. The financing was led by McRock Capital, with participation from Yamaha Motor Ventures. The round was supported by existing shareholders, including the Business Development Bank of Canada's (BDC) Industrial Innovation Venture Fund, and Real Ventures, reaffirming their confidence in Axya's growth trajectory. The company also established a new banking relationship with CIBC, which provides financing to support its next phase of expansion. Axya helps complex manufacturers make their supply chains more predictable, cost-effective, and resilient by combining deep ERP integrations with AI-powered workflows that complement existing procurement teams. The company specializes in three customer sectors: aerospace and defense, custom machinery and vehicles, and natural resources and processing. It helps leading manufacturers such as MDA Space and GE Aerospace modernize their procurement operations across mid-market to enterprise segments. Axya combines deep expertise in engineering-to-order and procurement operations with robust ERP integrations, working with Infor, Epicor, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, and Sage to connect supplier networks and ERP data. Its platform takes a human-in-the-loop approach that keeps procurement teams in control while AI automates the most time-consuming work, including normalizing data, flagging risks early, and identifying savings opportunities, so teams can focus on the most strategic decisions and actions. Axya connects manufacturers with all of their suppliers and integrates deeply with leading ERP systems, enabling buyers and suppliers to collaborate using multiple file formats and channels. Founder and CEO Félix Bélisle-Dockrill, with a background in mechanical engineering, worked in supplier quality for two of the largest manufacturers in the aerospace industry earlier in his career, where he experienced firsthand the challenges of evaluating and managing suppliers. That experience inspired him to find a better way to share knowledge and information across the supply chain and led him to found Axya. "Despite major investments in digital transformation, procurement remains one of the most fragmented functions within manufacturing organizations," said Bélisle-Dockrill. "Axya's platform connects the data, suppliers, and workflows that drive purchasing decisions, enabling manufacturers to reduce manual effort, improve supplier responsiveness, and build more resilient supply chains." With the new funding, Axya will invest in deepening its AI capabilities for risk detection, optimization, and automated workflows, as well as growing its sales, customer success, and engineering teams to drive faster deployments and better outcomes. In addition, the funding will help the company strengthen its North American presence and expand internationally, while broadening its ERP partnerships and partner programs to accelerate enterprise adoption. "We see an enormous market opportunity for industrial AI in the everyday work that keeps factories running. Manufacturing procurement is a prime example, where critical decisions still depend on scattered information," said Udit Bhatnagar, Partner at McRock Capital. "Axya brings AI directly into that workflow, helping manufacturers make better decisions and keep production moving. We led Axya's Series A because the team understands both the technology and the industrial problem it needs to solve." About Axya Axya is an AI-powered procurement platform that helps manufacturers modernize procurement operations by eliminating manual workflows, reducing late orders, and cutting inventory costs, expedited fees, and late penalties. Unlike procurement tools that require suppliers to adopt a new portal or workflow, Axya integrates with manufacturers' existing ERP environments and allows suppliers to participate through their current formats and channels. By combining engineering-to-order expertise with AI-powered analysis and streamlined workflows, Axya delivers a 100% supplier adoption rate and gives manufacturers real-time visibility and control over their procurement operations. To learn more, visit www.axya.co. SOURCE Axya