Epicor for Electronics and High Tech
Electronics and High Tech at Business Speed
The electronics and high-tech industry has never needed to move faster than today. With finished products typically having a life-cycle of six months or less, and competition coming from around the globe you need to optimize your planning, production, purchase, sale and after-sales processes to be leaner and more agile than your competitors. But it’s not enough to be faster, you also need to be first to market to maximize profit.
Epicor understands that you want to focus on your products and need a business software partner that supports all aspects of your enterprise, wherever you are in the supply chain. We know that you may be a subcontractor to another vendor one week, yet sell finished goods the next and OEM technology or products in the future. We understand the global nature of the electronics and high-tech business, with short end-product shelf-lives combined with after-sales support driving your whole market. If you want to excel and move at the speed of business you need Epicor for Electronics and High Tech.
Supporting Your Business Processes
With rapid product obsolescence, extended after-sales support requirements, complex supply chains and long purchase lead times that drive production planning, businesses like yours are streamlining and adopting new technology to automate business processes for more competitive lead times and reduced waste. Epicor for Electronics and High Tech is a global enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solution designed for manufacturing and distribution organizations who supply products and services to the Electronics and High-Tech industry. Epicor for Electronics and High Tech provides a comprehensive framework for managing product innovation with solid product data management, quality process controls and cradle-to-grave product traceability.
Putting Your Customer at the Center of Your Business
Electronics and High-Tech manufacturers are continually being monitored for delivery performance, cost, and quality by their customers. In an effort to assist your organization in maintaining your premier status as an electronics and high tech supplier, Epicor for Electronics and High Tech offers a suite of functionality designed to put the demands of your customer first. Embedded Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality provides complete workflow for each quote, including customer sign-off, at each critical stage from initial design through estimate. Additionally, with embedded Demand Management and full Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) collaboration, customer demands can be implemented in real time.
Lean Production
With increased global competition in electronics and high tech and the demands of an online supply chain, customers have more influence than ever before. Customers are, demanding greater product flexibility, smaller, more frequent deliveries and higher product quality, at a lower price.
Businesses are widening the scope and focus of lean principles to encompass all processes that contribute to the bottom line. The true benefits of lean thinking will only be fully realized when the entire enterprise adopts the lean ideology.
Specific functionality has been developed in Epicor for Electronics and High-Tech operations that are adopting work order less Kanban manufacturing strategies in part or fully to pull rather than push products through the manufacturing process. Epicor Lean Manufacturing Kanban functionality supports this.
Keeping Pace with Demand Planning, Forecasting and Scheduling
In the fast-paced electronics and high-tech industry, inventory is always at risk of becoming obsolete. In order to be successful at managing this risk you must be able to perform demand planning, forecasting and scheduling effectively. Epicor for Electronics and High Tech enables effective and accurate demand planning, forecasting and scheduling to ensure accurate inventory levels to meet customer expectations and minimize risk.
Forecasting and Master Production Scheduling (MPS) in Epicor are designed to assist electronics and high-tech manufacturers and distributors with both day-to-day control and long-range planning and decision making. Forecasting and MPS support your business strategies and can be generated from multiple historical sources (e.g., sales, invoice, and inventory usage history).
Epicor for Electronics and High Tech offers a number of forecasting methods from the simple to the complex to meet the needs of your business.
The scheduling engine uses several factors that affect production quantity, setup time, production time, capacity, priority, and so on to calculate how long it will take each job to complete. It then displays the schedule through the Job Scheduling Board, the Resource Scheduling Board, and the Multi-Resource Scheduling Board.
Epicor Advanced Planning and Scheduling incorporates the strength of the scheduling engine and enhances it with advanced functionality such as multiple constraint scheduling, a wide range of scheduling methods, visual drag-and-drop scheduling, capability and dependent capability-based scheduling, real-time capable-to-promise functionality, and advanced material planning functionality.
Maximize Equipment Effectiveness
Epicor Mattec® Manufacturing Execution System (MES) empowers electronics and high-tech manufacturers with real-time performance data and the ability to eliminate inaccurate and time-consuming manual data collection. Producers who extend their Epicor system with automatic production monitoring enable operators to focus on making quality product–they anticipate and avoid problems, eliminate downtime, and maximize throughput–all from the front lines, and long before issues can affect performance. The real-time data also provides instant, accurate insight on equipment status and tool effectiveness, so you can achieve informed lights out manufacturing.
The “production pulse” paves the way for accurate, consistent performance metrics so the entire team can focus on getting better–Overall Equipment Effectiveness, run rates, scrap, yield, and much more. It’s all delivered in a way that makes sense for each individual–from the shop floor to the top floor –with operator depth and dimension to help you pinpoint and tackle chronic loss. Better performance with Epicor Mattec MES helps you boost quality, customer service, and competitiveness. Epicor Mattec MES supports digital and analog machine signals directly from machines or sensors, or via PLC or OPC-compliant PLC.
Diversifying Your Workforce
In this business climate, many manufacturers are stepping up new programs for recruiting new workers and cross training existing workers. Along with these new initiatives, new industry mandates requiring strict proof of competence and training are forcing manufacturers to move beyond their Excel spreadsheets to systems that automate tracking of the workforce. Epicor Human Capital Management (HCM) is a comprehensive, configurable human resource information system (HRIS) that empowers users by automating your HR processes enabling you to meet strict mandates for employee skill, certifications, and qualifications.
Supporting Extended and Global Operations
With competitive pressures driving many manufacturers to expand globally where labor is considerably less expensive coupled with recent trend in plant consolidations, many manufacturers today, both large and small, find themselves suddenly managing multiple sites disparately.
Epicor for Electronics and High Tech offers comprehensive multisite capabilities coupled with global presence to meet your company’s requirements for local support. Competing globally and domestically— bridging geographic and strategic diversity and eliminating supply chain inefficiencies—can be accomplished with the technologies to streamline intra- and inter-company processes and communicate quickly and accurately.
Synchronization of complex relationships which determine supply, demand, and fulfillment is the means to reaching new, industry-leading levels of business performance, all while adhering to global standards for trade of parts such as GTIN-14 and RoHS compliance. Epicor for Electronics and High Tech can help you achieve maximum efficiencies across your globally extended enterprise.
Epicor Social Enterprise
Epicor Social Enterprise is a collaboration solution that provides a fundamental shift in the way electronics and high-tech organizations engage with their ERP to make decisions about their business. Fully embedded within Epicor ERP to enable access to all the business information, Social Enterprise fosters cross-company collaboration bringing social media concepts and contextual information together in a single tool where everyone is able to collaborate directly with each other around Epicor ERP. This allows people to share information with each other building up knowledge bases, working together to solve problems (crowd sourcing), while creating a repository in which no good ideas are lost. Users do not need in-depth knowledge of the Epicor toolset to subscribe and unsubscribe to information as and when they want. Epicor Social Enterprise will enable real time collaboration in areas critical to success for your electronics and high-tech business processes such as; quote preparation, new product innovation, engineering change control, and quality improvement initiatives.
Robust Technology Framework
Epicor is uniquely positioned with a complete suite of applications based on 100% service-oriented architecture, protecting your investment in software and services well into the future. Why are web services so important to manufacturers, particularly in Electronics and High Tech? Outside of all the reasons organizations look to web services for deployment; speed, stability, reusability, and more. For midsize electronics and high-tech manufacturers, the incentive is imminent to drive electronic connection more firmly into their supply chain. Web services collaboration is fast becoming a necessity to doing business.
Supporting your business strategies with applications built on service-oriented architecture (SOA) keeps the door open for electronics and high-tech businesses by meeting both the immediate requirement for scalability while supporting an open
philosophy in the event your business strategy changes. SOA simplifies the coming together of established infrastructures to make acquisition and merger less painful—attractive to companies looking to acquire.
Flexible Deployment Options
As your business grows and changes, you need a solution that can grow and change with you. As a single solution able to be deployed on premise, hosted, or in the cloud, Epicor for Electronics and High Tech provides you options for deployment flexibility. For example, if your business has limited IT resources you may opt to initially deploy the solution in a hosted model or in the cloud. As your business changes you may subsequently opt to redeploy Epicor ERP on premise.
Epicor is one of the few vendors to have architected a full multitenant software as a service (SaaS) and on-premise version out of a single product and is the only leading vendor who has deployed it to customers.1
Industry Leading Service and Support
Epicor has over 40 years of experience delivering industry focused, world-class solutions, and ongoing customer care and service to over 20,000 customer installations. It is a true global solutions partner with support offices all over the world. The key vehicle that transforms Epicor for Electronics and High Tech into a successful business solution is our Signature Implementation Methodology.
Epicor delivers among the most cost effective and efficient techniques to plan, design, validate and deploy your Epicor solution. Staffed with direct employees around the globe who are properly trained and equipped with world-class implementation tools, Epicor follows our proven 5-stage Signature Methodology designed specifically around Epicor software and our customers. The end result is an on-time, on-budget implementation of your Epicor solution that allows your company to quickly begin using Epicor for Electronics and High Tech in day-to-day operations thereby saving you time and money by providing broad functionality at a lower total cost of ownership.
1Magic Quadrant for Single-Instance ERP for Product-Centric Companies, Gartner Inc., September 11, 2013
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