We have been helping companies install and be productive on ERP's for 7 years now.
The majority of our experience is with Epicor Vantage®.
Here are the major ways we have helped our current customers
Implementation
Document what you are trying to do - No ERP can succeed until there is at
least a basic set of procedures that have been documented and the appropriate people have been
trained on them.
Consider a situation where you are trying to efficiently order the 500 parts you need to make
your product. If receiving, and shipping, and part picking are not in place and working correctly,
you don’t stand a chance. No amount of effort will produce value until your organization is agreed
upon how the basics are going to work.
We have a substantial set of processes that have been developed over time. They are generic,
and most will certainly have to be changed to include the nuances of your business. Having a huge head
start helps in countless ways.
The data has to be correct - If the day to day transactions are being processed
correctly, the data still has to be correct for the system to function. You can hardly expect scheduling or
MRP to produce meaningful data if the BOMs are not correct, or vendor lead times are all set at 1 day, or
all the operation time standards are set to 0 pieces/hour.
The data is usually somewhere. We have the expertise to help you get the data into the system from
wherever it may currently live. If this process needs to be ongoing (nightly, or real time), we can make
that happen to.
A great example is your company’s Part Lifecycle Manager (PLM) or Part Data Manager (PDM).
As new parts and revisions are produced by engineering, it is important that that information makes it
into your production software on a timely basis.
Production
Can you see into your system - We can help you design advanced reporting in
Crystal or other reporting tools.
More 'heavy lifting' - Most ERPs’ are highly customizable. Especially with
respect to Vantage, we can help you customize your system so you can run your system as you want to,
not necessarily how the software seems to wants you to.
Product Configurators
Chances are your company sells a product that has a lot of options, or is ‘highly configurable’.
Properly capturing a customer’s requirements and then fulfilling that order can cause real problems for
your organization, in every single department.
Product Configurators are tools that strive to reduce the sales and engineering workload associated
with producing a product with many options. While product configurators can seem expensive, it’s about
value. What is the cost of NOT getting it right every time.
Some of the steps involved in implementing a product configurator include:
- Scrubbing Bills of Material and Operation Routings for the various combinations.
- Determining valid combonations of choices.
- Deciding what you want the resulting part numbers to be, and if those should go in
the item master.
- ...the list of things to consider goes on and on.
Only after there is a clear direction and all the starting blocks are in place, can construction
really begin. Building a configurator is a task that requires persistence, technical expertise, and a
very finely honed attention to detail.
Then, once you finally have a configuration in production, the next thing to consider is how it
changes over time.
We can help you untangle the issues and challenges, then approach them one at a time.