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BLOGS

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Aug 11, 2021
Digital Commerce Strategies for Manufacturers

Manufacturers focused on growth are finding it by discovering more about their customers' business problems and providing solutions for them. This opens new opportunities for manufacturers to stand out as the preferred option in a competitive marketplace. Using digital commerce and analytics technology, you can begin to innovate for your customers in new ways to provide them with a better buying experience, differentiate your brand, and give you an advantage over your competitors in the market.

One way to learn how to provide more value for your customers is to better understand what it's like for them to do business with your company, finding out what works well and what doesn't, and then improving their experience. An exercise to help you with this discovery process is customer journey mapping.

Customer journey mapping in three steps:

  • Collaborate with the right people.
    Gather the right people from across your organization, making sure you include someone from all departments that have a part in the customer's process of completing a purchase from your organization. This might include people in sales, customer service, the web team, shop floor, shipping, accounts receivable, etc. 
  • Put yourself in your customer's shoes.
    Pretend you are the customer and identify all the steps they go through when they buy from you. A big white board can come in handy. When you document the flow of all the touchpoints, it starts to look like a map. 
  • Analyze the experience at each touchpoint.
    Next, be very honest and talk about the quality of the experience for your customers at each point. For the things that everyone agrees work well-that's great, no changes needed. For things that don't work well-you've just uncovered a new business opportunity. This step can be hard to talk about as a group, but be brave and focus on the positive: finding new business opportunities by helping your customers.

Innovate for your customers
Take the new-found opportunities-areas you want to improve for your customers-and start brainstorming ways to transform those rough patches into a better customer experience. Digital solutions play a big part here-there are many ways in which technology can add value in your customer relationships. 

A robust eCommerce solution can simplify your customers' often-complex process of B2B purchasing with an intuitive, easy-to-use way to research, compare, and order your products online. Search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities help you put your brand in front of prospective customers who research your products and do price comparisons online. Self-service portals offer your customers an easy way to find answers about their orders, products, or invoices anytime, anywhere, without relying on your customer service office. A strong analytics solution  allows you to use the data from your customer purchasing processes to increase sales with order recommendations, better insight into customer purchase behaviors, and closer analysis of response data. With these advanced insights, you are positioned to make continuous improvements in the use of data collected online and internally for faster, better business decisions.

Customer centricity is key for manufacturing growth
No matter what products you manufacture, becoming more customer-centric is central to your ability to remain relevant and grow in today's evolving manufacturing markets. To succeed with a B2B digital commerce strategy, begin by thinking like your customers to understand their buying journey, and then find better ways for them to do business with you with digital solutions. To learn more about B2B eCommerce for manufacturing

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Jun 18, 2021
Service and Asset Management for Kinetic

With continued pressure on margins in the distribution and manufacturing sectors, improved customer service is a way to retain customers and increase revenue. Whether your company provides field service or runs an in-house service center, Kinetic field service management solutions can help your business gain better control over:

  • Contractual obligations
  • Service level agreements
  • Outstanding warranties

Explore Service and Asset Management for Kinetic

Service Management

Manage in-house repairs and basic offsite services or installations with the core service management capabilities of Kinetic.

Service Contract and Warranty Management

With Epicor Service Pro add contract and warranty management functionality for accurate, timely contract execution—including service level agreements with automatic billing options—and more.

Maintenance Management

Manage production and facilities equipment maintenance needs by adding tools designed for maintenance request processing—including planned and ad hoc maintenance.

Returned Material Authorization

Track returns and disposition processes across your organization using unique returned materials authorization (RMA) numbers that are part of the core module capabilities.

Case Management

Dig into field dispatching activities and let field service reps access online knowledge bases, customer field service calls, warranty info, and service contracts with built-in case management tools.

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Jun 18, 2021
Business Intelligence and Analytics for Kinetic

Business Intelligence and Analytics for Kinetic (new name for Epicor ERP) helps you answer four essential questions. What happened? Why did it happen? What is happening now? What will happen next?

Dashboards, trackers, and data visualization tools built into the core ERP platform help you visualize data and get a better understanding of what is happening in your company right now.

Add on to your solution for deeper trending, diagnostic, and predictive analytics to bring the future into focus

Business Intelligence and Analytics Capabilities

Operational Reports and Dashboards
Machine Monitoring and Reporting
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Jun 18, 2021
Epicor ERP (now known as Kinetic) provides Big Ass Fans equally large savings

Big Ass Fans first made its mark selling massive ceiling fans that spun slowly but moved astounding amounts of air thanks to aerodynamically friendly designs. The fans kept large spaces that lacked air conditioning, such as factories and dairy barns, feeling cool and comfortable. Recently, the company also introduced a line of LED lighting fixtures as well as residential fans.

“That drives a lot of complexity on the bill of materials and how all those parts come together on the factory floor. That's where I think technology is critical because you can't manage that level of complexity without having a tight ERP system.”

 
Bill Nall
Chief Information Officer

Big Ass Fans' first enterprise resource planning (ERP) system promised scalability-however, that wasn't the case as CEO Carey Smith recalled when the company was making around $10 million in revenue, “I remember them saying, 'even if you get as big as $25 million [in revenue] we'll be able to help you.'” With the company's innovative fan designs quickly catching on in the market, they soon found themselves pushing that system's upper boundaries.

After an extensive search, the company landed on Epicor ERP, which has proven capable of growing alongside the company. “It's only a ceiling fan, but it's a very complex product,” said Bill Nall, chief information officer, Big Ass Fans. “That drives a lot of complexity on the bill of materials and how all those parts come together on the factory floor. That's where I think technology is critical because you can't manage that level of complexity without having a tight ERP system.”

Full visibility across a global supply chain

The company achieves its aggressive growth rates thanks in part to continuously reevaluating its processes and products. “We have grown since 2008 at a rate of about 30% a year every single year. We do that by developing new products, by continually developing and re-organizing the company, and the way in which we do business,” Smith added.

The company has manufacturing plants globally, so the ability for all of them to stay connected is paramount to its success, and it all starts with order fulfillment and planning. Big Ass Fans plans production well in advance to meet the customer's expectation. “A good ERP system is huge from the standpoint of being able to take all of the demand, all of the sales orders, and tie everything together,” said Greg Finley, production manager. “Epicor ERP literally ties our company together from beginning to end and all the way to shipping product to customers in a timely manner.” 

Business intelligence in the supply chain

Big Ass Fans is no stranger to some of the biggest challenges in manufacturing-reducing costs, maximizing inventory, and meeting fluctuating demand. However, where it sets itself apart is how deep it goes into the data provided by its Epicor ERP to grow its business through procurement-whether it's leveraging existing vendor data for better rates on materials or identifying new business opportunities, using the business intelligence data provided by its Epicor ERP solution is at the forefront of the company's growth goals.

“I think one of the things that's most important when I look at the business as we've grown is the fact we're able to have more analytics, more vision on the company and on the parts,” said Smith. “In order to take advantage of new opportunities, you have to have business intelligence. We think that the ERP system that Epicor provides that's a major component-all of our analytics are built on that. It's very important for us, because we can't tell what opportunities we can avail ourselves of if we don't have the figures. If we can't quantify it, it doesn't exist.”

Looking back at switching from the ERP system struggling with a $25 million revenue company, Carey said, “From a customer perspective, talking to a supplier I feel honesty is important, and we're very pleased with the way it's worked out. Now it's been 10 years later and it's [Epicor ERP] still working. It's great. We've been able to grow into a $300 million company by investing in software that allows us to reach our customers, and control our inventory and production. I can't imagine how this could have been done without having a very robust software system and partner, like Epicor.”

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Jun 18, 2021
Production Management Software

EpicorÂź manufacturing and production management software offers easy-to-use production management capabilities designed to meet the needs of progressive make to order and mixed mode manufacturing companies. Epicor understands that many manufacturers are complex businesses that defy categorization, often making complex products alongside more straightforward repetitive ones. They require exceptionally flexible and versatile software in order to accommodate combinations of make to order (MTO), configure to order (CTO), engineer to order (ETO), and make to stock (MTS).

Manufacturing Production Software

So, whether you’re a make to order, configure to order, engineer to order,  or simply a make to stock  business, our production management software  is complemented with a full range of supply chain management, supply chain execution and distribution capabilities—all delivered within a single business platform. As one would expect, Epicor manufacturing solutions include job and work order management, material requirements planning (MRP) software, lean manufacturing, manufacturing execution system (MES), and master data management (MDM) to answer all your production management needs.

Epicor further extends our production management solutions with advanced quality management and product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions to offer support for industry and regulatory compliance initiatives, measured quality, and concept-to-retire lifecycle management in support of reduced quality problems and improved cost control, while meeting designed for manufacturability and sustainability standards.

Manufacturing Production Solutions

Built using a service-oriented architecture (SOA), Epicor production management software enables continuous performance initiatives, mobile workers, real-time connectivity, social collaboration, and intuitive business intelligence—from the shop floor all the way through to your supply-chain partners—to provide greater business agility in pursuit of perfect customer service. Scalable, flexible, configurable—entrust your production management to Epicor for a modern approach to manufacturing excellence.

ERP in the Cloud. On your terms.

Epicor offers true cloud deployment of Kinetic (new name for Epicor ERP), providing companies of all sizes our feature-rich ERP solution on a simple monthly subscription basis. Our cloud offering is functionally identical to our on-premises deployment option, providing you the opportunity to embrace the cloud on your own terms, and to adapt your deployment model as your business or technical needs change. Epicor provides ERP in the cloud without the drawbacks, allowing you to embrace the cloud on your own terms, while increasing agility, simplifying administration and reducing costs.

© 2020 Epicor Software Corporation