Co-Innovating with Our Customers

Arturo Buzzalino, Group Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer, at the 2024 Epicor Insights user conference

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly through large language models like ChatGPT, into ERP software is poised to remake the landscape of industrial technology. Just ask the thousands of customers who turned out in force at our annual Insights 2024 user conference to learn more.

Only in retrospect can we fully understand the significance of the shifts that periodically shake the technology firmament. In the case of AI, however, it’s clear that something truly transformative is happening—we’re talking about nothing less than altering how businesses operate by embedding these advanced capabilities into the core of their operational workflows.

And Epicor is helping to accelerate this shift.

Our Drive to AI

At our annual Insights 2024 user conference, my colleagues and I discussed the ongoing efforts at Epicor to make ERP more user-friendly and powerful. ERP software, by its very design, sits at the heart of organizations, coordinating and managing core business processes across various departments. 

Now we’re able to take the next step forward with our new Epicor Grow portfolio, which debuted at Insights. This integrated suite of AI and business intelligence capabilities delivers use cases tailored for the make, move, and sell industries. 

The central component of Epicor Grow is Epicor Prism, which features a collection of generative AI services that allows customers and partners to use the Epicor data model to develop and deploy AI functions.

Innovation and Collaboration

To understand what this means in practice for our customers, consider our close collaboration with the Visa Cash App Red Bull Formula One Team. 

As the official ERP partner to the Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team since 2021, Epicor works with team members across the organization to deliver increased agility on the factory floor while driving competitive advancement on the track.

Let’s take a closer look at what this means in terms of both production and performance:

• Epicor solutions are crucial for managing every step of the production workflow at the team's Faenza, Italy factory.
• The seamlessness and agility of this workflow directly impact the cars' performance on the track.
• Visa Cash App RB continually pushes the limits of physics with their incredible race cars.
• These improvements require timely access to all necessary parts, which Epicor helps ensure. 

This is no trivial exercise, when you realize that a single racing car requires more than 14,000 precision components, many of which are custom-made. In the past, that presented many challenges when it came to managing the production for each unique part, understanding lifespan, and making sure that all required parts were ready on race day.

Making Better Sense of the Data

We’ve been working with Visa Cash App RB to improve the efficiency of their production and purchasing operations. At the heart of that effort is Epicor Kinetic, which serves as the company’s ERP for manufacturing.

Over the years Visa Cash App RB has deployed Kinetic to centrally manage all processes and data across its operation—optimizing every aspect of the team’s production, inventory, component testing, and financials to deliver greater speed, accuracy, and organizational visibility.

To advance their boundary-pushing quest for superior performance, Visa Cash App RB recently became an early adopter of Epicor Prism, the large language model we unveiled at our user conference. Epicor Prism utilizes a network of agents tailored to make, move, and sell business processes. Visa Cash App RB employees interact with Prism on the front end, while behind the scenes, task-specific agents work together to provide insights or complete actions based on user prompts.

Our collaboration focused on how to help Visa Cash App RB make better supply chain decisions. It’s quite normal for a company to solicit data from literally thousands of suppliers. It’s an overwhelming task to sift through all the information and responses based on various criteria such as price, performance, and on-time delivery. 

But with Epicor Prism, Visa Cash App RB can absorb all that information and then connect immediately with suppliers, reducing the response time required from weeks to a matter of minutes. Since adopting Prism, Visa Cash App RB has rapidly seen transformative improvements in both production and purchasing processes:

• The Epicor Prism code assistant runs production reports and creates automated business processes faster, meeting the needs of the business more efficiently while eliminating cumbersome, time-consuming tasks. 
• Managers are using conversational ERP to access production and purchasing insights faster, no longer needing to memorize where all reports are filed. Instead, they can instantly ask Epicor Prism for information stored in the ERP to make quick, efficient decisions. 
• Visa Cash App RB plans to start testing automated supplier communications to speed up purchasing and optimize make-and-buy decisions. This enables the team to automatically send RFQs to their supplier network, and parse and translate quotes to determine the best price and fastest delivery.

More Innovation Ahead

When you pose a question, Epicor Prism is like a manager of industry-specific agents, determining which agent can best answer your inquiry. But this is only the beginning. 

In the future, Epicor Prism could consist of communities of distributors, and retailers, manufacturers offering suggestions like, "Makers like you tend to ask for this...here is a prompt or template for creating a report or query." These suggestions would function like a prompt library.    

Looking forward, I expect the experience of using Epicor Prism will change how we interact with ERP systems. Instead of needing many preset user interfaces, we will simply prompt our ERP to show what’s needed—and the response will seamlessly deliver the information you are seeking. This is what users experience when software is built on LLM platforms. Our Prism customers will be able to do all of this within their ERP system, without ever going outside of Epicor to leverage AI.   

At Epicor, we know that ERP will be the vehicle for AI adoption for essential industries, and we will continue to lead the way in developing state-of-the-art solutions for our customers. Our partners are at the forefront of everything we do. As they deploy our technology in their operations, we’re collaborating on a groundbreaking journey to realize AI’s full potential—and in the process, we’re transforming how our customers operate every day.

Now that’s innovation. 

Learn how Epicor solutions and Epicor Prism can help your business thrive.