Over 100 years after their first loaf of bread came out of the coal-fired oven that began it all, one of today’s largest privately owned commercial bakeries in North America chose Epicor ERP Express to bring their ERP system into the modern world in order to cut costs and keep pace with company growth, they ditched their legacy systems and made the move to Epicor ERP Express Edition. Here’s why.

Before Epicor ERP Express, company employees relied on a combination of multiple ERP and financial management systems. These included PRISM, a process manufacturing ERP system which was an industry leader in the 1970s and 1980s but has since become obsolete, IFM financial management software, and MAPICS ERP. Not only did the company’s software strategy lack the competitive advantages of modern technology, these legacy systems created a number of major problems and expenses for the company.

For example, the publishers dropped support services for their legacy systems a long time ago, and ever since the company has had to rely on the few partners still serving customers on these products. This meant having to call on and work around outside resources for help each and every time users needed to run reports or extract data from the system. This was costly and time consuming which slowed processes, impacting customer service, and increasing operational costs.

“The cost of maintaining the old system vs. the value our team was receiving was no longer acceptable; and like most companies, our team is very busy and needs to be able to respond quickly to our customers’ orders and needs,” said the company’s CFO.

In addition to data inaccessibility, the company was also experiencing other problems commonly recognized by those with outdated software, such as data inaccuracy as well as arduous manual processes.

“The information pertaining to our financials, inventory, and job costing was inaccurate, and access to important data was impeded or delayed in the old system. This caused a lot of extra work for everyone; keeping separate spreadsheets of data outside the system, manually tracking information, and ‘double checking’ everything.”

All in all, the system was becoming much more trouble than it was worth, and executives decided it was finally time to pull the plug on their old software systems and implement a modern ERP solution and found that Epicor ERP Express was their best option.

Epicor ERP Express provided them with everything they needed to succeed in a competitive modern business world, and it came at an affordable price point. Epicor Express is the same software used in much larger enterprise organizations, but delivered using a SaaS ERP model designed specifically for small to medium sized manufacturing companies who want to harness the power of Epicor without all of the extra cost and complexities.

“Bigger and more expensive does not always mean better. Epicor Express not only has a lot of integrated functionality around our manufacturing, procurement and financial management processes, but it also has an extensive technical toolset and integration capabilities we need for complex manufacturing and operational processes.”

One of the touted benefits of cloud ERP like Epicor Express is rapid implementation which is something the company experienced this firsthand. In only a three short months the organization was able to set up and begin using all of the financial, inventory, production, purchasing, and sales management modules within Epicor Express. The cloud ERP implementation began the implementation in October of 2014, setup was completed and users were entering orders in the new system by December 2014, and all modules were up and running by January 1, 2015 despite some complex requirements.

“The Express solution allowed us to start simply and get the system up and running quickly. We purchased the core modules first and were able to setup and enter all the necessary engineering, financial, items customer, and supplier data, as well as train our core team and go-live to begin processing transactions in less than 90 days! This was especially impressive since we have over 300 finished goods that are comprised of deep Bills of Material with revision control and quality management processes – so it was not just a ‘basic’ setup.”

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