Epicor ERP drives 4,400+ hour annual efficiency improvement for Drallim Industries

Epicor Software Corporation, a global leader in business software solutions for manufacturing, distribution, retail and services organisations, has announced that UK customer Drallim Industries, an engineering and manufacturing company, has achieved significant savings through its use of the Epicor® next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution.

The new Epicor solution has had a direct impact on costs:

•The project itself came in 23% under budget
•Annual support costs are down 21% during the initial year of operation
•Administrative efficiencies alone are expected to save the company over 4,400 hours per year across 30 users.

Process improvements have reduced lead times across the entire company with administrative efficiencies coming from all areas of the business including report preparation, serial number control, goods receiving, supplier payments, general ledger management and systems administration. Cash flow has also been significantly improved through an electronic account receivable payment interface that has seen payment terms drop from 60 days to 5 on average.

Epicor ERP was deployed as part of a three-year strategic planning cycle to update IT systems ‘for the future’ and facilitate the smooth transition of four companies purchased through acquisitions into a single organisation. Drallim Industries’ existing ERP system had also begun to show its age; it was less able to respond to changes the company needed to remain competitive and expand its business into new areas. As with all manufacturers, Drallim was also dealing with margin pressures on its products, so needed to react quickly to changes in demand and turn orders around faster.

“Updating our ERP system was central to solving these problems and becoming more efficient,” said managing director Dave Mooney. “The future of the company would only be secured by remaining competitive, so we wanted a solution that would solve the challenges we had now and help us build the business in the future.”

Drallim selected Epicor because of its advanced financials and the level of functionality available “out of the box” for businesses in its markets. Epicor also provides a direct upgrade path for customers on earlier versions of the product family, such as Epicor Avanté.

Drallim now has complete real-time visibility across all of the businesses that it acquired during the project, in a single system. This enables teams to plan workloads and be extremely agile when unexpected external factors come into play, such as supplier delays or urgent order opportunities. Drallim manufactures thousands of different products and Epicor has given the management team a much more detailed understanding of manufacturing times and costs.

“Agility is key to our success. Epicor allows us to move quickly and quote for projects in a way that will make us profit, and remain competitive in terms of cost, quality, and delivery timescales,” added Mooney.

“For the management team at Drallim, greater control over the business has been the big win,” concluded Mooney. “We have total financial visibility of the costs of every product we manufacture and our performance. This is already providing us with information that will help us further refine manufacturing and administrative processes in the future. We now have a technology platform than can adapt with the business in the future.”

“Taking the decision to upgrade critical IT systems is always difficult and getting to go live a very nervous time for all involved,” said Malcolm Fox, director, product marketing for Epicor. “At Epicor we’ve taken great care to make that transition as easy as possible through our Signature methodology and software tools to support the movement and transformation of data between systems.”

Epicor Software Corp.

Epicor is a global leader dedicated to providing integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management…