AI & Automation for BisTrack

BisTrack in one paragraph

BisTrack is Epicor's ERP for lumber and building materials dealers: building centers, pro dealers, and distributors selling to contractors and builders. It covers the LBM-specific ground, with call-off orders released in stages against construction jobs, job addresses and lien information on customer accounts, negotiated contractor pricing, special orders, dispatch and delivery, and co-op integrations. Epicor claims a large share of the top building-supply companies run it. Like the rest of the Epicor family, it's mid-migration: the desktop client's final feature release is planned for December 2026, with the web-and-API platform carrying things forward.

Order entry: the biggest gap

Counter sales aside, orders arrive as emailed builder POs, jobsite phone calls, and PDFs, and someone rebuilds each one in Order Entry. Epicor's answer is an add-on called Order Entry Automation, template-based OCR that covers the repeat customers you've built templates for. The template-free alternative is a custom AI order entry system, built by Airdev, that reads whatever arrives, matches it against your items and that contractor's pricing, and stages draft orders a person approves. This is the highest-volume pain at almost every dealer we talk to, so we wrote it up in full.

EDI and the co-op

BisTrack has a native EDI interface for trading partner documents, and providers like Infocon Systems map inbound 850s and 860s into sales orders. The co-op hooks (Do it Best, ACE) are built in. Coverage is the limit at an LBM dealer, though: the accounts that send 850s are large builders and suppliers, and most contractor volume arrives as email, PDF, and phone instead.

Importing orders

BisTrack has three native paths: file imports through the eBusiness module (reviewed and applied in the eBusiness Browser), the EDI interface, and order pushes through the separately licensed BisTrack API. All of them want structured or templated input, which an emailed contractor PO isn't.

Vendor invoices and AP

AP is where Epicor has already shipped AI for BisTrack. AP Assist reads vendor invoices from PDFs and scans, matches them two-way or three-way against purchase orders and receipts, and routes exceptions to a person. If your AP team keys invoices today, price it before building anything. Epicor's invoice reader adapts to new vendor layouts on its own; the order-side reader still needs a template per customer.

Quotes, takeoffs, and RFQs

Quoting splits three ways at an LBM dealer: plan takeoffs (served by dedicated estimating tools), vendor configurator quotes (already flowing in through integrations like Saberis), and emailed contractor RFQs, which have no documented native intake path and get keyed by hand. That third slice automates with the same matching AI order entry uses.

Epicor's AI and where BisTrack stands

BisTrack sits outside Epicor's main AI push so far. Prism and Grow AI shipped for Kinetic and Prophet 21 cloud customers in 2025; no Prism agent has been announced for BisTrack, and the July 2026 Conexiom order-automation partnership covers Prophet 21 and Eclipse only. What BisTrack has is AP Assist's invoice AI and the template OCR add-on for orders. The full picture, and what it means for a dealer deciding now, gets its own page.

The integration surface

Everything above rides on three surfaces: the separately licensed BisTrack API (orders, quotes, customers, dispatch, and SQL-backed Smart View extracts), the eBusiness file-import module, and, for reads, the SQL Server database itself. Documentation is sparse and community knowledge lives in the dbUG user group, so integration work here rewards prior BisTrack experience.

Where to start

For most dealers the answer is contractor order intake. It's usually the highest-volume manual work, and the matching it requires (descriptions, tallies, and units resolved against your product file at that customer's negotiated pricing) is the same work quote automation reuses later. If AP is the louder pain, AP Assist is a strong first move and comes straight from Epicor. Either way, pick one workflow, prove the human review step on real orders, and expand from there.

Frequently asked questions