Capital Equipment & Machinery ERP Features

ERP software functionality varies widely by industry segment and there are many complexities and special business requirements for manufacturers of capital equipment and machinery not found in other manufacturing industry segments. Few ERP systems handle this as well as Epicor ERP.

A New Perspective for Industrial Machinery Manufacturers

Epicor understands that as an industry machinery or capital equipment manufacturer, you must identify, consider, and respond to a new set of challenges each day. Change in this industry is a given; managing the change with tools and services to distinguish your business from local and global competition is fundamental. With increasing pressure to reduce prices in a business climate of expanding raw material cost, reduced labor availability, and customers across the world. Businesses like yours are streamlining and adopting new technology to automate business processes for more competitive lead times and to reduce waste in the organization. In this increasingly competitive market, if you aren’t keeping your customers happy someone else will. Epicor for Industrial Machinery can give you the tools needed to compete in the industrial machinery industry, with a full range of functionality built specifically for companies like yours. From the initial customer contact to sales, planning, supply, production, fulfillment, accounting, and after sales service, our solution can help you manage every step along the way.

Social Business and Cross-functional Collaboration

Epicor Social Enterprise is a collaboration solution that provides a fundamental shift in the way 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 business processes such as; bid and proposal preparation, customer services, project management, engineering change control, and quality improvement initiatives.

Reduce Your Labor and Material Cost

Lean Manufacturing

Epicor for Industrial Machinery is a real-time solution designed to support paperless manufacturing. Through the use of Kanban production, Epicor for Industrial Machinery will allow you to produce your fast-moving products without setting up work orders and will create queue records for the work that needs to be completed, therefore eliminating the need for paper. Epicor for Industrial Machinery supports four types of Kanban, giving you the flexibility to run your work cells in a manner that best suits each situation or product. Whether you wish to replenish when minimums are met or replenish based on future demand, Epicor for Industrial Machinery can help to ensure that you have stock where you need it, when you need it.This solution combines the rules of material requirements planning with the efficiencies of Kanban manufacturing, giving users the ability to plan for the use of parts with long lead times, while at the same time allowing for replenishment of parts with little to no lead times. This flexibility to plan for all your resources leads to greater productivity and shorter lead times.

Simplified Product Lifecycle Management

For companies in the industrial machinery industry, Simplified Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is imperative. Development and design documents must be made available for the entire product lifecycle, from design to manufacturing, and thereafter, for access by service and sales departments. Epicor PLM includes storage, administration and supply of all product-related and supplement data during the entire operational process. PLM interacts with project managers and engineers, as well as employees in quality assurance. Premier, support is given to the design department. Epicor PLM provides all required functions for design management, including those for passing work results from the technical designers to the neighboring departments. Workflow management, scan and plot management, as well as document viewing in large heterogeneous networks and over the Internet, complete the range of powerful PLM features employed. Epicor PLM’s modular structure makes it an extremely flexible instrument which can easily be adapted to the respective requirements in any industrial machinery enterprise.

Improve Employee Productivity

Production Management

Epicor for Industrial Machinery goes beyond traditional production functionality by offering a comprehensive manufacturing control solution designed to handle make-to-order, engineer-to-order and make-to-stock production. Epicor for Industrial Machinery’s Job Manager gives you the flexibility to review and update production plans as demand changes. The Planning Workbench provides you with access to all related job information in a single view, where you can track your costs associated to production, and compare estimated versus actual costing.

Innovative, easy-to-use scheduling tools help you identify and eliminate bottlenecks before they hit the shop floor. If you’re facing an overload at a critical work center, an operator can just drag-and-drop a job’s schedule forward or backward to alleviate the overload. Epicor for Industrial Machinery supports scheduling jobs based on forward, backward, finite, and infinite capacity. Machine and work center maintenance schedules are integrated with the production schedule, so you can minimize downtime while still tooling parts to exacting tolerances.

Mobile Operations

The Manufacturing Execution System (MES) allows inventory movements and labor entries to be reported on the shop floor, giving management a more accurate, up-to-date view of production. Since MES is integrated with Job Management and Scheduling, you can eliminate dual entry of data. The Work Queues provide employees with prioritized work schedules, eliminating the need for print-outs or instructions from management.

The Advanced Material Management module (AMM) extends the MES functionality to include queue requests for inventory movements of raw materials and WIP, as well as order allocations and inventory reservations. Within AMM, transactions can be entered on data collection devices, reducing the number of data entry mistakes and speeding up the process via barcode scanning. AMM also allows you to set up pick faces with replenishment levels that will automatically initiate inventory moves.

Increase Profit and Maximize Sales Opportunities

Increased Responsiveness

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) controls all aspects of a company’s interaction with its customers and potential customers from generating the lead, developing the opportunity, taking the order, producing the goods, shipping the goods, getting the cash, and supporting the customer. Throughout this process, Epicor CRM allows the customer to be tightly involved within the entire supply chain process through collaboration using Epicor Social Enterprise (ESE), Web-based customer portals delivered using Epicor Commerce Connect (ECC). In addition, built-in Workflow capabilities allow you to monitor every step in the sales cycle.

For most industrial machinery companies, having the ability to commission and support your products once they have been shipped to the customer is an essential part of business. The Epicor for Industrial Machinery Helpdesk module provides a customer focused solution for personalized, high-quality service. The Helpdesk includes Case Management, equipped with time-saving links to customer focused activities where customer calls can be used to generate quotes, return material authorizations, place orders, field service jobs, or workflow tasks. Using Helpdesk helps you reduce the cost of offering quality service while maximizing the revenue potential of your field service employees. Collaborative social tools allow engineering, production control, quality and compliance, and service to subscribe to escalation groups and communicate on problem resolution and next steps.

Supplier Relationship Management

In an effort to compete in your industry, you must respond quickly to your customers’ requests. In order to manage demand effectively, without having out-of-control inventory levels, you need a facility to efficiently interact with your suppliers, many of which are spread across the globe. The Epicor Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) module is fully integrated with the Quote Management, Job Management, Inventory Management, Purchase Management, and supplier Connect modules. Within SRM you can create and manage your Requests for Quotations (RFQs) effectively. Filter and sort RFQ criteria based on your specific needs to find the best match for the needed materials. The supplierConnect module allows you to collaborate with your suppliers electronically, giving them the ability to review inventory levels, check payments, and process open POs and RFQs online. With supplier Connect, you are able to open up a gateway for your suppliers to access important information from your Epicor for Industrial Machinery system, freeing up your procurement staff from time-consuming phone calls, faxes and e-mails. Engage with suppliers outside of the procurement process to improve internal efficiencies by collaborating together to resolve problems, answer questions and deliver new levels of responsiveness using Epicor Social Enterprise.

Deliver Higher Quality Products to Your Customers

Quality Assurance

Within the Quality Assurance module, you can access all quality functions including the scrapping of raw materials and finished goods and tracking first article inspections. Queues are available for all material needing inspection. Shop floor workers can add non-conformant parts to the inspection queues, and inspectors have full disposition and corrective action follow-up capabilities.

Transform Your Data into Knowledge with Business Intelligence

Epicor Business Intelligence emphasizes the active use of the right information, at the right time, for the right person, to proactively guide and adjust the course of the business, rather than passively measure its progress. It can transform your data into actionable information. With the BI solution, you can quickly access and analyze your company’s data, disseminate critical information in easy-to-read formats, and review dataanalysis from several perspectives (e.g., production, financial, internal, external). You an also create indicators to measure your progress against strategic goals.

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 Industrial Machinery 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 Industrial Machinery can help you achieve maximum efficiencies across your globally extended enterprise.

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 industrial machinery? Outside of all the reasons organizations look to web services for deployment; speed, stability, reusability, and more. For midsize manufacturers who supply top industrial machinery 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 industrial machinery businesses by meeting both the immediate requirement for scalability while supporting an open philosophy in the event your business strategy changes. SOAsimplifies 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 Aerospace and Defense provides unprecedented 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.

How Do We Deliver

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 Industrial Machinery into a successful business solution is its 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 Industrial Machinery in day-to-day operations. Signature and Epicor for Industrial Machinery save your company time and money by providing broad functionality at a lower total cost of ownership.

Magic Quadrant for Single-Instance ERP for Product-Centric Companies, Gartner Inc., September 11, 2013 

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