Epicor Software Corporation

Business Challenge
To integrate a global business across 3 manufacturing sites providing enterprise wide visibility and efficiency savings

Solution
Epicor for Manufacturing

Business Benefits
- £2m in cash savings through stock reductions alone
- Visibility improved from zero to one hundred per cent
- Much improved Supplier Relationship Management
- Sales Analysis reduced from 3 days to 3 hours

Established in 1986, Texecom is an award-winning manufacturer of intruder products, including a full range of motion detectors, control panels, perimeter protection devices, detectors and external sounders. Serving a worldwide market with its diverse product range, the company manufactures on a large scale across three sites handling in excess of 1,000-1,500 orders per month, each of which is designed to the appropriate regulatory and legislative requirements of the destined country of use.

Andy Bowden is Head of IT with Texecom. “Our three main manufacturing processes are plastics moulding, printing circuit board assembly and final product assembly, but there is a great deal of complexity involved. For example, at the PCB stage, we design and build all our PCB’s in-house from scratch which requires ensuring components are available for each PCB and having these accurately scheduled through six multipurpose lines, all of which need to be configured on a product by product basis. These in turn have to be synchronised with the other sites’ manufacturing operations to ensure all the parts arrive at final assembly at the same time.”

Unsurprisingly one of the key requirements in order to operate efficiently and effectively is coordinated planning and scheduling combined with real-time visibility of what is happening at every level of the business. Working hand-in-hand with this is the requirement to integrate Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) across the entire business, dealing with suppliers across the globe, hugely diverse lead times, and varying reliability factors.

Prior to investing in the Epicor solution, Texecom had relied on running Pegasus Opera at each individual site with International Sales running its own sales order system. These were all supplemented with a complex arrangement of bespoke spreadsheets, databases, proprietary systems and manual workarounds. The impact on the company was typical of any non-integrated approach - most notably a lack of visibility of information across the entire company and in any depth at any area.

Following Texecom’s acquisition by the Halma Group in Nov 2005, a year long project began to build a firm IT foundation on which to support a new ERP system. Epicor was the system of choice after a thorough evaluation involving twelve stakeholders from each business area on the basis of flexibility and versatility. The use of the industry standard, rock solid SQL back-end and Crystal Reports combined with the approach of Epicor itself also highly impressed Texecom.

Implementation commenced in May 2007 following the tried and tested Epicor approach. Key users were identified and trained accordingly over a 2-3 month period with Bowden being involved in 95% of all training during which he gained a thorough insight into the entire system. Alongside this concentrated training ran an in-depth business process analysis project which compared how processes currently ran with Pegasus and how ideally they ought to run.

The hard work and commitment paid off with Texecom going live in only 4 months – 5 months ahead of the vendors projected implementation time and 10% under budget. It has already delivered a range of benefits, the first falling into what Bowden describes as the “we couldn’t do it before and now we can” category. For example Texecom went from zero visibility to complete visibility of what was happening throughout the company. It could now see accurately and in real-time the position of any order on the system and its physical progress through site. Other examples include now being possible to see stock and labour costs per product which means that the company can now immediately see the true cost of each order and therefore the profit of an order.

The second category comprises quantifiable benefits. “We quickly saw that one site used purely for warehousing was actually no longer required, resulting in a stock reduction of £600k. Stock reduction at our moulding plant was over £300k while the stock was reduced at our assembly plant by around £1m. This freed up close to two million pounds of cash, and made a dramatic improvement in our working capital position and return on investment results.” These quantifiable benefits are spread throughout the company which demonstrates the value of a truly integrated ERP system. For example, production scheduling has been reduced from eight people attending a half day meeting every month to two people taking two hours. Sales analysis from Finance now takes three hours as opposed to three days while the number of data input points has been reduced from four to one.

The final category of benefits achieved, are those that are perceived but not quantifiable. Examples of this include much greater supplier relationship management in terms of negotiating purchase price and managing the flow of incoming stock. The company is also able to undertake up-to-date exchange rate processing when dealing with non-UK customers as opposed to highly aggregated rates with the old system. This massively helps with compiling monthly management accounts both accurately and on time.

Future plans include a move to task based engineering management using Epicor to help streamline and automate workflow. Other considerations include EDI transactions with suppliers, Shop Floor Data Capture (SFDC) via hand held terminals and the use of Epicor’s Information Worker Portal to deliver true Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality to remote workers across the globe.

“The company has achieved tremendous changes in the past two years resulting from changes in the way the business as a whole is run and the changes in the manufacturing IT that facilitate this. The Epicor solution has been at the very heart of this and stands us in great shape for the future.”

Andy Bowden, IT Director Texecom

Business Benefits

- Epicor provides a broad toolset for planning and managing all resources within and across location and company boundaries

- Epicor's software is built on the open Microsoft .NET platform which provides Communisis with the flexibility it requires for its operations

- Communisis is using the full manufacturing suite to get the maximum benefits from this tightly integrated software to identify and plan the resources needed to capture, produce, ship and account for customer orders

Communisis plc provides marketing business process solutions to some of the biggest brands in Europe, is the UK's market leader in direct mail production, has the biggest transactional document site in Europe (producing 1.5 million documents a day) and is the fastest growing digital solutions provider in Europe. Amongst its thousands of customers, Communisis includes Barclays, Centrica, The Co-operative Group and The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to name but a few.

This dominant position has been achieved by continually developing new ways of sourcing and managing print and communications. In this quest to help its customers communicate more profitably with their customers, Communisis has sought out the best-of-breed solution and frequently acquired it.

Business Challenges
This aggressive acquisition strategy resulted in a powerful offering combining a unique print management solution along with transactional print and world-class direct marketing production facilities but, unfortunately and perhaps inevitably, disparate enterprise resource planning (ERP) and MIS systems.

Communisis offers a whole portfolio of related services: print and document management, statement and billing outsourcing, direct mail services, cheques, security print, marketing process consultancy, and e-print sourcing solutions. The organisation employs around 1500 people across the UK and Europe in over 15 sites, some of which are within customer premises. Normality for Communisis is processing around 800 orders a day from quote to cash.

To maintain its competitive edge, Communisis decided that it needed strong control and governance across all of its activities and to that end is implementing an ERP system which will encompass all of the business functions.

Solution Overview
Epicor Manufacturing was selected because it fits the Communisis criteria of providing extreme scalability at optimal cost. According to Paul Beresford, Business Systems Director at Communisis, “Epicor also provides a broad toolset for planning and managing all resources within and across location and company boundaries which is ideally suited to the Communisis landscape.” Epicor's software is built on the open Microsoft .NET platform, providing Communisis with the flexibility it requires for its operations. Although Epicor software is modular, Communisis is using the full manufacturing suite to get the maximum benefits from this tightly integrated software to identify and plan the resources needed to capture, produce, ship and account for customer orders. Communisis implemented Epicor on Windows servers in one of its business units in nine months and is now benefitting from the experience it gained during this roll-out to deploy the software throughout the enterprise.

The Challenges
Beresford warns, “The reality is that ERP is not easy. It is vital to be aware from the outset that it is a challenging exercise which demands a huge level of commitment and investment from the entire organisation.” Communisis used the opportunity of implementing ERP to take an in-depth examination of its business which Beresford says has given the organisation the opportunity to review its inherent business practices and upgrade them. It has also invested in its staff as it felt that to ensure the success of the implementation Communisis needed in-house expertise in Epicor software. Given their understanding of the business drivers, these people can then align the software structure with the company's goals. The Communisis Epicor seven-strong team comprises database administrators, trainers, business consultants as well as the director and improvement director. Key to the Epicor solution is the distributed, common database which provides users access to the right information from the right source at the right time. As Beresford points out though, this data must be maintained, “We had to educate our users to demonstrate that spending additional time inputting data where they never had to before would save time in the long-term and would have further benefits to the organisation.” In „parts management? users have had to make a huge effort in inputting a range of different data. This proved an onerous task but the benefits have been seen in the MRP cycle as information such as supplier, cost, and delivery times are immediately on hand and the system can even make a part order suggestion. Beresford explains that it is all about managing expectations and also demonstrating efficiency gains: “The benefits of a full set of data are well worth the time needed to compile it.” Alongside this, a key challenge for Communisis was keeping its diverse business functioning effectively whilst implementing this massive change. This was achieved because the organisation had acknowledged the importance of this rationalisation and investment had been made in the significant internal resource to ensure a smooth adoption of the new software and business practices.

Business Challenge

The National Accounts division had systems that had been home grown and developed over a number of years, and they could no longer handle the increasing volume of information. Having used Epicor Enterprise over several years, Costa Coffee sought to upgrade its solution to streamline and improve the business to fulfill the growing demand, particularly from the contract catering market along with large enterprise customers.

Solution

Costa Coffee upgraded to Epicor Enterprise 7.3.6 which delivers new interface modifications as well as more timely and actionable business intelligence.

Business Benefits

-       Aiming to double the business over the next few years

-       Improved awareness of the company’s financial risk and better ability to fulfill orders correctly

-       Achieve strategy of moving from national to corporate sales  

Epicor Enterprise provides the knowledge to enable double digit growth
Costa Coffee is the largest and fastest growing coffee shop chain in the UK and has plans to consolidate that position over the coming years. Operating in 24 countries, with 820 stores in the UK and over 300 internationally, Costa has experienced a remarkable period of growth since it opened its first store in 1971. The organisation’s roasting, sales and logistics business enjoys a double digit yearly growth rate supplying coffee and a wide range of branded signage, cups and merchandise to over 2,000 hotels, universities, hospitals, leisure centres, airlines, ships, pubs, bars and restaurants across the UK.

As part of the Whitbread plc group, Costa benefits from the infrastructure, experience and financial stability that the hospitality giant brings, though Costa had to work independently to find a solution for taking and fulfilling orders.

Business Background
"Costa Coffee’s National Accounts business, including hotels, leisure outlets and large enterprise customers, continues to grow alongside our retail group," explains Bob Wilde, Head of Systems for Costa Coffee. "As one of the oldest parts of our business, the National Accounts division had systems that had been home grown and developed over a number of years which could no longer handle the increasing volume. So we had to find something that could and unfortunately there was nothing similar within Whitbread."

"In 2006, as part of this exercise, we started a project to look at ays of streamlining and improving the business to fulfil the growing demand, particularly from the contract catering market along with large enterprise customers," Wilde said. "Having used Epicor Enterprise in a limited way over several years, we hoped to find a way to expand the software to meet our business needs."

Solution Overview
By upgrading to Epicor Enterprise 7.3.6 which delivers new interface modifications as well as more timely and actionable business intelligence, it was quickly established that Enterprise was more than fit for purpose for Costa’s existing and anticipated needs of the future. The upgrade meant that Costa removed a number of wasted steps in the order taking process which made it quicker and less prone to errors, such as incorrect delivery instructions. Whilst these enhanced capabilities are invaluable to Costa, it is the added business intelligence capabilities that Wilde anticipates having the most impact on the business.

The Challenges
According to Wilde, to make the most of the software’s business intelligence potential it was vital for the organisation to take a step back and make changes to its core business processes. These concerned order processing, account management and also involved defining new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the business. "We restructured the general ledger to improve searches and used the new business intelligence tools to create more meaningful reports to support debt management and produce our new KPIs." In the past, Costa could successfully take orders and deliver product but it could not capture the information needed to drive the business. "To grow the business, the information we gather must change from sales to margin knowledge," explains Wilde. Costa is targeting higher value corporate customers and to attract, retain and grow these customers it is vital to have a picture of them that is as accurate and full as is possible. Wilde gives an example of this utility, "When dealing with corporate catering companies it is invaluable for us to know when and why they have lost a client so that we can address our own churn rate. If, for example, we knew that a large corporate had changed its catering company in one of its outlets we could find out whether this change would be across its entire enterprise and hopefully discover how this would affect our own contract." Costa now has a full insight into the shape of all of its customers; it knows what the customer needs, where it has come from, how long it has been a customer and all other details relevant to that account. "We are gaining more and more insight into the needs of our corporate customers and can therefore respond more rapidly to their requirements and so grow our own business," explains Wilde. The Epicor solution sits in the Whitbread managed data centre and is developed and supported by Epicor. Costa made the decision that it did not want its users making ad hoc changes to the software that could be undocumented and unmaintainable. Costa currently has 15 Epicor users responsible for transactions in terms of order, credit, stock, and financial management and a further 30 users, account and channel managers, that use the business intelligence tools to interrogate the system.

"Epicor gives us the information we need to ensure that we are aware of our financial risk and that we can fulfil orders correctly."