13 EPICOR ERP FEATURES YOU NEED AT THE CENTER OF YOUR BUSINESS

Competition in the manufacturing industry increases by the day. To keep up, you need to give your employees powerful tools so they can better serve your customers and successfully reach out and connect with prospects. By having a comprehensive ERP solution at the center of your business, you will empower your employees to do just that. This whitepaper will walk you through the 13 major functional areas of Epicor 9 and briefly explain how these features will change the way you do business, add value for your customers, help you gain control over your operations, and enable your employees to achieve their goals.

1. FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

Managing your organization’s finances will always be among your largest challenges, but it will also be one of your biggest and most significant opportunities. Epicor Financial Management offers a suite of accounting applications designed for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance as well as GAAP, IFRS, and other regulatory requirements. By using Epicor 9 for financial management, you can reduce costs, improve cash flow, and increase your revenue.

GENERAL LEDGER

Process and post entries created by the operational areas of Epicor 9, as well as manual entries made directly in GL. The chart of accounts is easily established to control how you want the system to report on your business

ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE

Know who is buying what and who is paying their bills on time. Bill your customers as goods and services are shipped or delivered, and then track payments as they are received. Other options are available to work with Epicor ERP to give you even deeper insight and control over your accounts receivable activities with Epicor Cash Collect, a robust AR collections module for Epicor ERP.

ACCOUNTS PAYABLE

Know how much you owe and when it is due. Among other features, users can enter supplier invoices for purchases that you make, and then create payments for the invoices you want to pay. The system can generate payments for all invoices due, those for a particular supplier, or only for specific invoices. Give your AP employees access to complete information at their fingertips, and history can be kept indefinitely.

ASSET MANAGEMENT

Track assets and their depreciation, add assets as they are needed, dispose of assets, Calculate values and depreciations for assets at the end of a fiscal year, and more.

CURRENCY MANAGEMENT

Automate the process of buying and selling in foreign currencies, and reduce manual transactions with tracking of default currencies, as well as extensive exchange rate tables. Additionally you can lock transactions in at a specified contract rate with automatic gain or loss reporting, reducing the guesswork from handling foreign transactions.

MULTIPLE BOOKS

One of the key requirements for many customers is the ability to have multiple GLs and Budgets. Often there is a need to prepare a General Ledger for a parent company in the format they require while your local requirements are different, and alternatively the reverse can be true as well. Those scenarios and others are supported in Epicor 9.

REBATE MANAGEMENT

The Rebates module provides you with a way to enter, update and review any rebate program that your company runs with your customers. Use this module to define the active rebate programs for your company. You can then generate the rebate transactions, and pay the rebate amounts to your customers through either an invoice check or a credit memo.

By using Epicor 9 for financial management, you will be able to manage all of your information from one integrated financial system with adaptable processes which support you both locally and globally. The suite is packed full of reporting tools to measure your performance and improve visibility across your entire organization.

2. CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

The importance of your customer relationships is getting to be more and more important as today’s marketplace becomes increasingly competitive. Customer relationship management (CRM) will help you accelerate growth while maintaining deep connections with your current customers.

CONTACT MANAGEMENT

Contact Management makes keeping in touch with your customers and prospects easy. Enhance customer service, improve overall responsiveness, and actively analyze your most exciting opportunities.

LEAD AND OPPORTUNITY MANAGEMENT

Manage incoming leads and assign to territory sales representatives. Track lead sources to identify successful advertising, events or other campaign tactics. Analyze return on investment of lead generation activities. Easily convert a lead into a quote/opportunity with Quote Management.

CASE MANAGEMENT

This comprehensive one-stop solution enables your service team to manage current case load and respond quickly to customers for industry leading customer satisfaction.

MARKETING MANAGEMENT

Make your marketing efforts work for you. Create campaigns and templates, report on metrics, management data, email, and segment your contact lists to focus your marketing efforts all from one place.

By managing your customer contacts with Epicor 9 ERP you will deliver a world class customer experience and shorten customer service response time while establishing, monitoring, and measuring your marketing, forecast and pipeline.

3. SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT

The demand for faster delivery and lower costs will never go away; so how do you try and meet your customer demands while staying a profitable enterprise? Removing processes that do not add value to your organization and synchronizing processes within and outside your company will enable you to better meet customer demands and give you a competitive advantage.

PURCHASE MANAGEMENT

With Purchase Management, you can reduce inventory levels, improve on-time deliveries, enhance your cash flow, and increase your profit levels. Handle purchase order writing and the tracking of supplier performance. Detailed line items indicate planned receipts to inventory or a job, although their destination may be changed at the time of actual receipt entry. Purchase order receipt processing updates suggested supplier and detailed purchase history files, which provides continual reference to aid in making purchasing decisions. An online time-phased material requirements report provides a strategic planning tool to buy the right amount of material – at the right time.

SUPPLIER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

A tool for purchasing agents or those providing quotes, to request quotes for raw materials or subcontract services from one or multiple suppliers. Request for quotations (RFQs) are generated with one or more lines, each line having the ability to request pricing from one or more suppliers.

INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

Inventory Management provides the key functions necessary to update and maintain raw materials, WIP, and finished goods inventory quantities and costs. A variety of screen inquiries provide management analysis of MRP, shortage monitoring, reorder analysis, stock status, valuation, and critical items.

SHIPPING AND RECEIVING

A central application within Epicor 9 to monitor incoming and outgoing items. With Shipping/Receiving, a consistent interface processes all shipments and receipts in an efficient, accurate and cost-effective manner.

ADVANCED MATERIAL MANAGEMENT

Produce electronic requests for materials, dispatch those materials, and track inventory movements of all inventory, including raw materials and work in process. Using wireless terminals and bar coding technology you are able to track inventory in real-time with complete control and visibility of raw materials and work in process as it travels throughout the enterprise.

4. PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT

In order to stay competitive in today’s marketplace, you need to respond quickly and efficiently to the demands of customers and changes in the marketplace. An agile solution can set you up with an infrastructure to do just that. Epicor Production Management gives you the tools you need for make-to-order, missed-mode, make to stock, engineer to order, and configure to order manufactures, as well as light assembly features for distribution companies.

JOB MANAGEMENT

A comprehensive manufacturing control solution designed specifically for the routing, scheduling, costing, and tracking of either custom or repetitive parts manufactured on the shop floor. Analysis tools provide the quick and accurate reference necessary for re-quoting a part or identifying the types of work at which your company is most profitable

LEAN PRODUCTION

Specific functionality has been developed in Epicor for plant floor operations that are adopting work order less Kanban manufacturing strategies in part or fully to pull rather than push products through the manufacturing.

MANUFACTURING EXECUTION SYSTEMS

This is useful for shop employees to enter their labor information directly on the manufacturing shop floor. As labor information is applied to jobs and as jobs are completed, the shop floor activity can be recorded and monitored in this module.

QUALITY ASSURANCE

Tie together all quality functions, whether it’s scrapping end parts, rejecting raw materials or tracking first article inspections. Inspectors have queues of items to inspect with full disposition and corrective action follow-up. Shop floor employees can flag parts as non-conformant, which moves them into an inspection queue. Parts that fail inspection may be flagged for review by a material review board.

Epicor production management will give you innovative tools for better planning and costing, while also giving you the ability to easily identify wasted processes, giving you an opportunity to improve your processes. With Epicor Production Management you can improve your productivity levels, reduce costs, and much more.

5. PLANNING AND SCHEDULING

To operate like the world-class business you know you are, you need to be able to predict what your customers will want and need before they do, and then you need to react to it. That sounds like a lot to ask of you, but with precise and flexible planning and scheduling you can keep up with the changes in your customer’s demands with minimal interruption in your business. Epicor planning and scheduling provides a comprehensive solution for companies with simple or complex processes that require project management, as well as resource management capabilities with features such as project management, forecasting and master production scheduling, materials requirements planning, scheduling and resource management, and advanced planning and scheduling.

By implementing planning and scheduling into your operations you can:

  • Check supply can demand of a part with available-to-promise functionality and imported forecast display by customer and part number
  • Consider product resource and create a visual finite schedule with a drag and drop multi resource schedule board
  • Deploy effective multi plant maintenance with information such as planning criteria, and share warehouses as well as established criteria for plant transfers.
  • Stay on top of project status and costs with a project tracker that uses visual indications and drill down functionality for more efficient project completion.

6. PRODUCT DATA MANAGEMENT

Epicor product data management serves as a central knowledge base for process and product history while promoting integration and data exchange among all enterprise users who interact with the products. Epicor product data management will keep your project managers, engineers, sales people, buyers and quality assurance representatives all on the same page with access to all of the information they need.

BILL OF MATERIALS

The software supports both traditional BOM management with single-level part formats that recognize the materials and components required to build end parts, and multilevel BOM management that incorporates not only single-level components and material requirements, but also internal and external routing steps for complete end-assembly visibility, planning, scheduling and costing.

ROUTINGS

Capability planning, critical path view, dimensional planning, resource planning, subcontracting services, visual display, and more.

ENGINEERING CHANGE AND REVISION CONTROL

Achieve control and consistency in your engineering change and revision process. Engineering Change and Revision Control is designed to enable engineering change management, multiple revision control of products, engineering workflow management, and offers detailed cost analysis of products during the engineering process.

PRODUCT COSTING

Manage costs with the costing workbench, cost load, cost rollup, set grouping, what-if cost sets, part cost per plant, and more.

PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) includes storage, administration and supply of all product-related as well as all supplemental data during the entire operational order processing and thereafter. It interacts with project managers, engineers as well as employees in quality assurance. PLM meets all requirements for a comprehensive product life cycle management. PLM’s modular structure makes it an extremely flexible instrument, which can easily be adapted to the respective requirements in an enterprise.

PRODUCT CONFIGURATION

Enables on-the-fly configuration of highly customizable and dimensional products via a straightforward question and answer evaluation. Product Configuration can be accessed from Quote Entry, Order Entry, and Job Entry.

7. GLOBAL BUSINESS MANAGEMENT

Whether through acquisition or organic growth, more and more companies are wrestling with the complexities of managing multiple business entities. Epicor Global Business Management ensures that no matter how distributed your organization becomes, you can maintain business without barriers. To support the needs of today’s increasingly distributed business, Epicor 9 ERP offers robust global business functionality within its design, supporting local requirements for specific countries alongside comprehensive multi-company functionality which provides companies with multiple facilities and flexible options when setting up operations. Epicor global business management offers organization and the essential tools needed to create and maintain a single version of the truth.

Epicor Global Business Management allows you to make geography irrelevant, increase productivity, successfully distribute operations and information, support multinational user communities, facilitate automatic transactions, and more with modules including:

  • Multi-company management
  • Global multisite management
  • Multicurrency management
  • Multilingual data management
  • Master data management

8. SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Epicor Service Management optimizes customer service and gives your personnel the information they need to properly handle and customer related issues. Your customers want a rapid response to their issues; Epicor Service Management was designed with this in mind. From initial contact with the customers to in-field operations, processing returns, and more, Epicor Service Management will provide visibility and accountability needed to support your customer’s needs efficiently. Customers will get fast and effective service once your support team has access to detailed information and other features such as mobile filed service, contract management, maintenance management, and return material authorization module.

RETURN MATERIAL AUTHORIZATION

RMA processing and the ability to handle inventory or warranty returns with a simple transaction make it easy.

FIELD SERVICE

Field Service is designed for people who install, repair, or service offsite or at the plant. You can centralize all processes related to the dispatching of technicians and cost reporting of service calls in the field. This application supports drop shipment of service parts directly to the customer site. The application is set up for a single interface, so a dispatcher can track all stages of each service call with just a few mouse clicks.

CONTRACT MANAGEMENT

Field Service is designed for people who install, repair, or service offsite or at the plant. You can centralize all processes related to the dispatching of technicians and cost reporting of service calls in the field. This application supports drop shipment of service parts directly to the customer site. The application is set up for a single interface, so a dispatcher can track all stages of each service call with just a few mouse clicks.

9. HUMAN CAPITAL MANAGEMENT

Epicor Human Capital Management allows you to go beyond the normal bounds of HR. Not only can you manage core payroll and other HR activities, you can manage and develop talent and labor resources locally and globally in a cost effective way. Epicor Human Capital Management delivers the necessary software support for all employee-related functions through modules such as payroll, human resource management, training, recruitment and employee self-service.

PAYROLL

Comprehensive employee information and memo fields allow you to track employee’s personnel information, like performance reviews and outside training. Because payroll is so tightly integrated with Job Management and Manufacturing Execution, you will normally only have to review your payroll entries, make adjustments, print your checks, and then post.

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Efficiently administer applicant tracking, benefit programs, workforce training and development, complex union dues, calculations and benefits, and ever-changing governmental regulations such as EEO, VETS, OSHA, and Affirmative Action Program reporting (AAP). Online communication via your company’s intranet helps your employees stay up-to-date on their benefits, training, and life event changes.

TRAINING AND RECRUITMENT

Track your ongoing training and certification requirements online with Epicor Training and Recruitment. The Training module is used to schedule courses and instructors as well as record training history, reducing the pain of your next regulatory audit. Training information is integrated with all other aspects of each employee, providing a complete picture of an employee’s lifecycle.

EMPLOYEE SELF-SERVICE

Epicor Employee Self-Service places the responsibility for employee and manager updates on their shoulders, freeing up the HR and payroll department personnel for more strategic activities. Both Manager and Employee Self-Service are designed to be extremely easy to use, so even individuals with little or no computer skills can easily navigate through the system with minimal effort.

Epicor Employee Self-Service places the responsibility for employee and manager updates on their shoulders, freeing up the HR and payroll department personnel for more strategic activities. Both Manager and Employee Self-Service are designed to be extremely easy to use, so even individuals with little or no computer skills can easily navigate through the system with minimal effort.

10. SALES MANAGEMENT

Produce accurate estimates, streamline your order-to-cash cycle, and fulfill orders that ensure world-class customer satisfaction with Epicor Sales Management. This suite allows you to streamline the sales process with centralized access to information on product, pricing and customers. Orders can then be generated with a minimal number of steps, enabling you to improve your sales activity and focus on building relationships and selling, not all of the tedious work that goes along with it.

With Epicor Sales Management you can manage sophisticated sales requirements manually or with EDI, generate timely estimates, quotes, and important data all in one place, provide a space for your customer to use self-service order placement and tracking and deliver an all-around efficient service.

ESTIMATE AND QUOTE MANAGEMENT

Quote Management is often the starting point for the supply chain cycle. When a quote is entered, manufacturing details can be entered for the record, giving a good head start for job management, scheduling, purchasing, and other parts of the system. The result is greater efficiency.

ORDER MANAGEMENT

All orders and change orders are effectively managed online, reducing your chance for error and smoothing out the entire order-to-delivery process for maximum customer satisfaction.

DEMAND MANAGEMENT

The Demand Management module lets you more efficiently manage short and long term contracts, turning the demand from these contracts into sales orders and MRP forecasts. You can enter this demand information manually, electronically through EDI, or both. This module’s features allow electronic communication of information both to and from your customers. Demand Management handles creation, analysis, editing, and reconciliation of cumulative records for releases from your customers.

ADVANCED EPI

Epicor 9 EDI provides an interface for managing and exchanging electronic documents with your trading partners. It offers direct integration with your Epicor data, reducing the turnaround time on schedule changes, additions and eliminating potential data entry errors.

11. PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Many companies struggle with running projects on time and keeping them within the budget. To be successful in a project environment, project management must be present in every aspect of your business solution to keep you on track. Epicor project management is a comprehensive solution for project managers who plan and execute simple to complex projects that can require intricate multilevel phases as well as strict project costing and billing. Use Epicor Project management for complete control and analysis of any project with modules including:

  • Project planning and structuring
  • Resource management
  • Time management
  • Expense management
  • Project billing
  • Project analytics

12. ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Some systems report with operational tools that measure performance from the past, Epicor Enterprise Performance Management reports and measures business as it happens – so you can be proactive, not reactive.

BUDGETING, PLANNING, AND FORECASTING

Allows organizations to formulate strategy, drive execution and more effectively monitor performance through integrated monitoring, analytics, and planning capabilities.

OPERATIONAL DATA STORE AND DATA WAREHOUSING

The ODS database provides read only access for operational reporting and provides data consolidation and cleansing operations to prepare data for use within the Epicor data warehouse. It acts as the sole source of data for the data warehouse. Data from external systems may be integrated into the ODS database to provide external system data into the warehouse.

TRACKERS AND DASHBOARDS

The Dashboard is your personalized information and command center and displays the current information and processes that you need to more efficiently perform your tasks. The data you choose to display is refreshed periodically, so you will be able to act on changes as they immediately occur. Set up the Dashboard to match your needs.

13. GOVERNANCE, RISK AND COMPLIANCE

TEffective Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) initiatives can help companies and their employees stay compliant and ensure that employees at all levels of the company are aware of the associated risk of non-compliance. Epicor GRC is delivered through a combination of embedded capabilities, modules, and related services. The solution includes adherence to published Sarbanes-Oxley standards in corporate and financial governance, as well as international accounting and financial reporting stands and GAAP while also incorporating support for international trade standards such as RoHS, WEEE, and NAFTA.

CONCLUSION

Epicor ERP is designed to support your company’s various business processes with one solution, eliminating data silos and desperate systems that can cause serious problems and inefficiencies s in your business. In a world with customers demanding increasingly fast turnarounds and lower pricing, communication throughout your organization is essential to meeting their needs and exceeding their expectations. Epicor ERP is a comprehensive solution portfolio that enables you to plan, schedule, execute, and monitor your entire manufacturing business – no matter your size or level of complexity. From raw materials to final product, Epicor for manufacturing provides you with the agility you need to make sure your business is competitive in today’s market.Let us help you with the difficult task of evaluating ERP software for your company. Contact us today.

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